The Pool
I cannot see what my friend sees
or know her thoughts of Yosemite or of me.
She lived here in the seventies, a ranger
with a gun, while her husband led expeditions
up the smooth granite walls. Family history,
her mother was a mountain climber, too.
I’m an uninspiring companion,
never having found myself in this world,
coddled like a tourist all the way.
I am gratefully invisible, observer, guest.
These young climbers, nymphs, at home,
in their full powers, relax and cool
in their young bodies seducing,
seduced, buoyed by the lie of authentic
beauty that lasts forever.
I stay back, unlacing boots,
t-shirted body against the warm rock,
drinking from the Nalgene bottle, the pool
too far for me to reach its elixir.
I capture no god’s eye and expect none.
My friend is deciding if she should unclothe and swim.
In her youth she would already be there,
not hanging back with modest, outsider me.
But six weeks ago the surgeons carved
the cancer and the breasts, leaving flat,
unmarked pits, covering as best they could
what was gone, but nothing in their place.
Maybe it was the title “plastic surgeon”
that caused her to reject the procedure,
ranging from reconstruction to replacement,
however “natural,” as inauthentic.
Now, confronted by what these nymphs would see,
her maimed body, maybe too much authenticity
to qualify as beauty, to be celebrated here.
“I thought I’d be more brave,” she said.
