Before the Pool, there was a Saltwater Lagoon by Sarah Bitter

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Before the Pool, there was a Saltwater Lagoon
by Sarah Bitter

a response to Gyula Kosice’s Variation in Blue  

Men leave me alone now, mostly, 
and they have left me (at) 
an old blue swimming pool far into a park
on the shore of Puget Sound. 
I  have to walk through a forest
and down an escarpment to get there. 
When I think of the men, I think 
of the blue of that pool and I am 
happy, mostly. I like to swim at dawn
when the mist rises off the water
and blurs the edges of sea and sky. 
After I swim, I walk back up the bluff, 
into the cedars and that smell—humus  
and trees in full green, at the edge 
of the dry season—is the smell of dying.
 

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Hear Sarah Bitter recite the poem on the Viewless Wings Poetry Podcast:

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