#Dolphin watercolour splash

[ttdtofi]

The Hotel Normandie Pool

I

Around the cold pool in the metal light of New Year's morning, I choose one of nine cast-iron umbrellas set in iron tables for work and coffee. The first cigarette triggers the usual fusillade of coughs. After a breeze the pool settles the weight of its reflections on one line. Sunshine lattices a blank wall with the shade of gables, stirs the splayed shadows of the hills like moths.

Last night, framed in the binding of that window, like the great chapter in some Russian novel in which, during the war, the prince comes home to watch the soundless waltzers dart and swivel, like fishes in their lamplit aquarium, I stood in my own gauze of swirling snow and, through the parted hair of ribboned drapes, felt, between gusts of music, the pool widen between myself and those light-scissored shapes.

The dancers stiffened and, like fish, were frozen in panes of ice blocked by the window frames; one woman fanned, still fluttering on a pin, as a dark fusillade of kettledrums

and a piercing cornet played "Auld Lang Syne"

while a battalion of drunk married men

reswore their vows. For this my fiftieth year,

I muttered to the ribbon-medalled water,

"Change me, my sign, to someone I can bear."

Now my pen's shadow, angled at the wrist with the chrome stanchions at the pool's edge, dims on its lines like birches in a mist as a cloud fills my hand. A drop punctuates the startled paper. The pool's iron umbrellas ring with the drizzle. Sun hits the water. The pool is blinding zinc. I shut my eyes, and as I raise their lids I see each daughter ride on the rayed shells of both irises.

The prayer is brief: That the transparent wrist would not cloud surfaces with my own shadow, and that this page's surface would unmist after my breath as pools and mirrors do. But all reflection gets no easier, although the brown, dry needles of that palm quiver to stasis and things resume their rhyme in water, like the rubber ring that is a red rubber ring inverted at the line's center.

Into that ring my younger daughter dived yesterday, slithering like a young dolphin, her rippling shadow hungering under her, with nothing there to show how well she moved but in my mind the veer of limb and fin. Transparent absences! Love makes me look

through a clear ceiling into rooms of sand;

I ask the element that is my sign,

"Oh, let her lithe head through that surface break!"

Aquarian, I was married to water; under that certain roof, I would lie still next to my sister spirit, horizontal below what stars derailed our parallel from our far vow's undeviating course; the next line rises as they enter it, Peter, Anna, Elizabeth—Margaret still sleeping with one arm around each daughter, in the true shape of love, beyond divorce.

Time cuts down on the length man can endure his own reflection. Entering a glass I surface quickly now, prefer to breathe the fetid and familiar atmosphere of work and cigarettes. Only tyrants believe their mirrors, or Narcissi, brooding on boards, before they plunge into their images; at fifty I have learnt that beyond words is the disfiguring exile of divorce.

II

Across blue seamless silk, iron umbrellas and a brown palm burn. A sandalled man comes out and, in a robe of foam-frayed terry cloth, with Roman graveness buries his room key, then, mummy-oiling both forearms and face with sunglasses still on, stands, fixing me,

and nods. Some petty businessman who tans

his pallor a negotiable bronze,

and the bright nod would have been commonplace

as he uncurled his shades above the pool's reflecting rim—white towel, toga-slung, foam hair repeated by the robe's frayed hem— but, in the lines of his sun-dazzled squint, a phrase was forming in that distant tongue of which the mind keeps just a mineral glint, the lovely Latin lost to all our schools: "Quis te misit, Magister?" And its whisper went through my cold body, veining it in stone.

On marble, concrete, or obsidian, your visit, Master, magnifies the lines of our small pool to that Ovidian thunder of surf between the Baltic pines. The light that swept Rome's squares and palaces, washing her tangled fountains of green bronze when you were one drop in a surf of faces— a fleck of spittle from the she-wolf's tooth— now splashes a palm's shadow at your foot.

Turn to us, Ovid. Our emerald sands are stained with sewage from each tin-shacked Rome; corruption, censorship, and arrogance make exile seem a happier thought than home. "Ah, for the calm proconsul with a voice as just and level as this Roman pool," our house slaves sigh; the field slaves scream revenge;

one moves between the flatterer and the fool

yearning for the old bondage from both ends.

And I, whose ancestors were slave and Roman, have seen both sides of the imperial foam, heard palm and pine tree alternate applause as the white breakers rose in galleries to settle, whispering at the tilted palm of the boy-god Augustus. My own face held negro Neros, chalk Caligulas; my own reflection slid along the glass of faces foaming past triumphal cars.

Master, each idea has become suspicious of its shadow. A lifelong friend whispers in his own house as if it might arrest him; markets no more applaud, as was their custom, our camouflaged, booted militias roaring past on camions, the sugar-apples of grenades growing on their belts; ideas with guns divide the islands; in dark squares the poems gather like conspirators.

Then Ovid said, "When I was first exiled, I missed my language as your tongue needs salt, in every watery shape I saw my child, no bench would tell my shadow ‘Here's your place’; bridges, canals, willow-fanned waterways turned from my parting gaze like an insult, till, on a tablet smooth as the pool's skin, I made reflections that, in many ways, were even stronger than their origin.

"Tiled villas anchored in their foaming orchards, parched terraces in a dust cloud of words, among clod-fires, wolfskins, starving herds, Tibullus' flute faded, sweetest of shepherds. Through shaggy pines the beaks of needling birds pricked me at Tomis to learn their tribal tongue, so, since desire is stronger than its disease, my pen's beak parted till we chirped one song in the unequal shade of equal trees.

"Campaigns enlarged our frontiers like clouds, but my own government was the bare boards of a plank table swept by resinous pines whose boughs kept skittering from Caesar's eye with every yaw. There, hammering out lines in that green forge to fit me for the horse, I bent on a solitude so tyrannous against the once seductive surf of crowds that no wife softens it, or Caesar's envy.

"And where are those detractors now who said that in and out of the imperial shade I scuttled, showing to a frowning sun the fickle dyes of the chameleon? Romans"—he smiled—"will mock your slavish rhyme, the slaves your love of Roman structures, when, from Metamorphoses to Tristia, art obeys its own order. Now it's time." Tying his toga gently, he went in.

There, at the year's horizon, he had stood, as if the pool's meridian were the line

that doubled the burden of his solitude

in either world; and, as one leaf fell,

his echo rippled: "Why here, of all places,

a small, suburban tropical hotel,

its pool pitched to a Mediterranean blue,

its palms rusting in their concrete oasis?

Because to make my image flatters you."

III

At dusk, the sky is loaded like watercolour paper with an orange wash in which every edge frays— a painting with no memory of the painter— and what this pool recites is not a phrase from an invisible, exiled laureate, where there's no laurel, but the scant applause of one dry, scraping palm tree as blue evening ignites its blossoms from one mango flower, and something, not a leaf, falls like a leaf,

as swifts with needle-beaks dart, panicking over the pool's cloud-closing light. For an envoi, write what the wrinkled god repeats to the boy-god: "May the last light of heaven pity us for the hardening lie in the face that we did not tell." Dusk. The trees blacken like the pool's umbrellas. Dusk. Suspension of every image and its voice. The mangoes pitch from their green dark like meteors. The fruit bat swings on its branch, a tongueless bell.