Katherine Northrop. Community Pool / Love Poem

Community Pool / Love Poem

                                                (the whirlpool)

  

It was gritty, where he was sitting

They needed to clean it

                   .

Then we three there

had stopped talking.  Where I’m from

advertisements are disappearing

into old barns.  A hay field

junky with the sound of red-wings.  We show up

most days, we bubbling strangers.  An older woman

lowers herself in.  Oh, she says, that’s hot!

What’s your tattoo a tattoo of?  To show him her shoulder,

she turns around.  It’s a picket fence,

a yellow rose threading through.  The point is, my Love!

still you appear to me, like a roadside stand.

                                                             -Katherine Northop. The poem appeared first in AGNI 80. By        permission here.