John Burnside. Community Pool
[from Black Cat Bone, 2011]
They come scattering out to the sky
like fireflies, lit with the green
of the deep end, my own
as random and shy as the others: shy
of themselves, being strange to themselves
and not altogether
the cumbersome mammals they were
when they shrugged off their clothes
and descended into the water, recovering
mangrove and marsh, and the sonar that runs in the spine
like a simmering touch, the extinct
and the still-to-come
radioed out in their hands
while the dark floods in
to drowse in the quick of them, homebound
and suddenly quiet.
