My neighbors' pools.

The way seals ride the incline then sweep like light down the scoured white tanks, you know they're dreaming the sea. Nights like these - windless - land-locked - all I need is a wintry descent in someone's pool: crescent or quadrangle, clotted with leaves or made fast with tarp. That icy slip into otherness, chest then hips grazing the pale slopes of the pool floor. Numbness like a second skin, eyes gone dark as a seal's trespassing in the dead of night, out of season in my neighbors' pools. Never the same one twice in a fortnight, I've grown meticulous about latches and gates, the loosening of knots, the first lifted corner where the moon rides and the waters stir.

Arms folded close as fins, I rush the blackness head first, hunt the circumference of each new pool, the dark overlap of leaves in unfit corners, the chubby rounds of crabapples, spiny feel of crickets. Through the chill waking, I grow sleek and fat in the frigid blue hold - so buoyant it seems my flutter kick is all spine. I plummet and rise through the underside of autumn, the scarlet bleed of maple on oak, the skin-taut border of water and halflight: brightening glance at the new world's rim.

Catherine Staples

t