AT THE POOL WE'VE ALL GOT BODIES

in

At the pool we’ve all got bodies.
Elsewhere we’ve got brands
we’ve got fabrications
we’ve got lulu lemon butt lifting pants.

At the pool we’ve all got bodies
in trunks and clam shells—
some working with flaps and pleats pleading
to conceal, others an experiment in Swiss minimalism

and risk management—
all of us dealing with the unalterable fact
that we’ve all got what we’ve got, that
at the pool

we’ve all got bodies:
bouncy bodies
bodies that need brushing
fluorescent white, white bodies
energized child bodies
hot-tubbed tired bodies
bodies

all of them absorbed in being here!—
not spiritual ghosts,
not online avatars,
but us, at the pool
with splashing, floating,
leaping bodies.

Lance Odegard

EXIT INTERVIEW

in

We sit across this desk,
but outside the office window 
stands a tree doing what all trees do 
and have done, many times each October.

We have no way of knowing 
if its limbs had grown weary, or what it heard 
to signal that now was the time, or whether 
there was any internal decision making 
that brought about the arrival of this moment.

We just have a tree out there on a grey wednesday 
co-operating, releasing yesterday’s 
prolific profusions, allowing the only life it has 
to be ordered by the ending of a season—willing 
now to no longer be laden, willing 
now to be latent.

We know this will keep happening every year, 
which has never once been strange 
for those living things who are always dying 
and living and letting go.

Lance Odegard