Ekphrastic Challenge, September 2020: Editor’s Choice
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.
__________
IN THE DREAM-POOL
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
September 2020, Editor’s Choice
__________
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.”
