Pool Day 77’

The Poem

The valley went gold that summer and stayed gold.1977. The reservoirs low, the city sayingdo not fill the pool —so we didn’t,and the pool became the other thingit had always been underneath:a bowl, a wave held still in concrete,waiting.

That was the gift the drought didn’t know it was giving:a hundred empty pools across Southern Californiaand a pack of kids who looked at the dry curve of a deep endand saw a wave you could ride without water.Down in Dogtown they’d already figured it out —Alva, the Z-Boys,dropping into other people’s empty poolslike they’d been waiting their whole lives for the water to leave.By that summer it had reached the Valley.It had reached us.

One of us dropped in on the skateboardthe way we’d seen them do it —knees soft, arms out,reading the curve of the empty poolthe way you read anything you love that might throw you:completely, at speed,already grinning before the wheels caught.

The cracks ran the whole floor like a mapof everywhere the water used to go.We learned them by heart.We learned everything by heart that summerbecause there was nothing else to do,and it turned out that was a gift, too.

And my mother —my mother laid a pink raft on the floor of the deep end,the driest deep end in the San Fernando Valley,and stretched out on it in her blue suitin the full sunas if the water were simply running late.

The driest deep end in the Valley

This is the thing I have carried the farthest:not the drought,not the boredom,but a woman who looked at an empty pooland decided to sunbathe in it —who made the day into the day it was supposed to beout of exactly what the day had left.

The pig watched from the deck.The pig always watched.Black, unhurried, entirely unbotheredby the rules about water,witnessing the whole gold afternoonwith the calm of somethingthat has never once been bored in its lifeand was not about to start.

The pig always watched

Tell me — what is it you plan to dowith your one wild and precious life?

We answered it that summerwithout knowing the question had been asked.You drop in.You read the curve.You ride the dry floor of the thingyou were promised and didn’t get —and the one who can’t skatelays her raft at the bottomand turns her face to the sun anyway.

The pool stayed empty.
The summer stayed gold.
My mother stayed exactly where she was —
which was, it turns out,
the deep end all along.