The Pool

Tim Loveday

The fibreglass shell appeared one day

and with it my bleached hair & board shorts.

It lay in the backyard, the goats

relegated God knows where. Now or

then, depending on the argument, I squared

my shoulders & tucked my chin & put

my hands together like a carbon arrow.

I suspect, in all honesty, I waded in like Jesus

with his robes trailing behind him, for I was

fully clothed—I was always fully clothed—&

challenged by conceits of diving. Sure, you square

yourself, a bone rectangle; in such you build a border

of your body and wait for concrete to set—

We were swimming before that, I think, before

they’d finished building, before the box of the pool

was muscular, before we knew the true meaning

of treading water & diving was just that: freefall. I say we

because my brother must have been there, the photo

says so, his shirt hung over him limp like the world’s

worst tent. Father would’ve loathed it. He had a habit

of saying Toby like it was excavated

dirt, sand-riddled & not quite useful for foliage.

If I remember the construction of the pool

it is submerged in what came afterwards, even

if that after wasn’t quite completeness, nor naivety

—even if it was just the poem diving outward

in a thousand unequal iterations, like two boys

adrift in the deep end flipping upward

& over in perpetuity. Lines that turn

as rapidly as water or land, searching

only for their own reflections.

TIM LOVEDAY is a poet and baby academic. He won the 2022 and the 2024 Dorothy Porter Poetry Award, the 2025 Calanthe Poetry Prize and the 2023 Venie Holmgren Environmental Poetry Award. Tim is the poetry editor at Island Magazine. His work has been widely published. timloveday.com