D. A. Lockhart
Pool Beneath the Old Bathhouse

I wonder what I’m doing here,
soaking as old
Flathead slides around
the poolside in thick flannel.
He’s been here all his life.
Not looking so healthy.

Our simmering water flows smoothly,
colliding with disappearing hillsides.
No sky, only clouds, steam
and sulphur.
Flathead says nothing.
“That’s the smell of healthy,”
utters a bearded berry farmer
from down Oregon way.
He’s the only other one
moving inside our shared tempest.

Yet, we know nothing
of each other but our forms
against dead thickets of grass
towering above snowdrifts.
While wind fearfully shakes them
under boarded up hotel above us.

Plywood,
not so distant,
creaks in gusting flurries.
It’s this twenty-foot cement tub
and old Flathead holding forth
in the enveloping whiteness of storm.

Mountains become walls,
sky ceases to be sky, we sit.
As visitors we’ve come
to a place haunted by memories,
faded, crumbling vistas
of what place failed with promises.
Old Flathead takes our five dollars,
drives up the vanishing road.

<< return to the Table of Contents for New Series #3: Summer 2010, Volume 2 Number 1