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      October 29, 2020In the Dream-PoolElizabeth McMunn-Tetangco

      Image: “Pool Head” by Pat Singer. “In the Dream-Pool” was written by Elizabeth McMunn-Tetangco for Rattle’s Ekphrastic Challenge, September 2020, and selected as the Editor’s Choice.
      All summer long,
      the pool was closed,
      and I swam
      continents,
      asleep.
       
      Glimpses of aqua
      through a fence.
       
      A neighbor’s
      swimsuit.
       
      Mouthwash blue.
       
      The thing with dream-pools is
      you never get to swim.
       
      The thing with dream-pools is
      they all mean something else.
       
      When summer ended, the need passed
      like an old pet, drifting
      somewhere, like the wildfire smoke, or souls.
       
      I thought of towels I’d sewed my name on,
      how they one time seemed important.
       
      In a dream-pool, I am floating,
      silent blue in sheets around me.
       
      In a dream-pool I am safe,
      cleansed of whatever
       
      came in with me,
      my skin tight.

      from Ekphrastic Challenge

      Comment from the Editor, Timothy Green

      “Interestingly, both this poem and the artist’s choice throb with the losses of the pandemic while looking through a fence that isn’t in the painting. In this case, the closing of the summer pool becomes a kind of obsession, haunting in its absence, as so many things are. There are so many memorable lines here: ‘The thing with dream-pools is / you never get to swim.’ That will stick with me.”

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