I
Like a practice
baptism that sent
our souls nowhere,
we leaned back
into the blue-walled
town pool,
hands open
to hot summer sky.
We learned
to still ourselves,
to allow
our bodies’
hollow chambers
to lift us again
above the weight
of water
and our breath,
unsealed, returned
our voices to us.
II
The pool
remembers briefly
everything that touched it,
written in nothing
more than its motion.
Each ripple.
Each trough.
III
Now the pool rests
beneath a field.
Filled in like any grave
and largely forgotten.
There’s nothing
here for the moon
to pull at anymore,
but night rain recalls
pausing with the water once
gathered here
and whispers a complaint
to weeds and rocks
on its way into deep,
slow aquifers
and eons
in the dark.
–
Lee Potts is a poet with work in various journals, including Rust + Moth, UCity Review, Rogue Agent, Kissing Dynamite, Sugar House Review, and others. His chapbook, And Drought Will Follow, is due out in late 2020 from Frosted Fire Press. He is poetry editor at Barren Magazine, and you can find him on Twitter @LeePottsPoet.