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JOSEPHINE BAKER SWIMMING POOL
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My wife and the others plunge in,
sluice the water like the most elegant of porpoises.
Even my land–lubber heart feels the charm,
the elemental power of water, wishing
I had the ability to join the swimmers,
if only to scissor back and forth once.
Through the ceiling dome, a Paris rain,
a band of crows circle in the dart-blue sky,
Josephine Baker’s spirit among them—I believe
in such things, despite the world’s admonishment
and every evidence to the contrary.
My wife is out of the pool, toweling herself off,
slowly swaying her hips, her own Banana Dance
. cool among the marble and the immortality.
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ON THE HORIZON
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Along the shore,
still in love with the terra firma,
I set my sights on the future.
The array of lights in the distance
gives me a sense of calm, of promise,
a journey one can take with pride.
That boat floating like a blossom—
I think I’m on it, blowing kisses
to the past, where I stood to receive them.
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Tim Suermondt is the author of four full-length collections of poems: Trying To Help The Elephant Man Dance (The Backwaters Press, 2007), Just Beautiful (New York Quarterly Books, 2010), Election Night And The Five Satins (Glass Lyre Press, 2016) and The World Doesn’t Know You published by Pinyon Publishing in late 2017. His fifth book Josephine Baker Swimming Pool will be released in 2018 by MadHat Press. He has poems published in Poetry, The Georgia Review, Ploughshares, Prairie Schooner, Blackbird, Bellevue Literary Review, North Dakota Quarterly, december magazine, Plume Poetry Journal, Poetry East and Stand Magazine (England), among others. He is a book reviewer for Cervena Barva Press and a poetry reviewer for Bellevue Literary Review. He lives in Cambridge (MA) with his wife, the poet Pui Ying Wong.
North of Oxford 