It’s been decades since I lusted
after a particular pool. My sister and I,
young synchronized swimmers,

fell hard for the Neptune pool
on our first visit to Hearst Castle,
and dreamed of doing ballet legs

in that aqua water surrounded
by a pseudo-Greek temple. How
glorious, we imagined, to swim

in that ginormous pool with its
classic, black-patterned bottom and
Art Deco sculptures on the rim.

Now my heart longs for a much
smaller pool, mid-mod like me,
shaped like a champagne cork

at a 1950s hotel-turned-condo
in the desert. For five winter days—
all oddly cool for these parts—

I’ve had the pool all to myself.
And on my last swim down
the middle of what has

become the pool of future
wet dreams—the one with
the just-right temperature

and the just-right fluffy
clouds overhead—I was
pleased at the way

the old body memory
breast stroked and sculled me
up and down, up and down,

alive and well, if heavier
and not nearly as lithe
as those long-ago summers,

but oh, to pause, to float and float
held in all that blue beneath,
in the endless heavens above.