What made you think of Laura now?

I was as surprised as you are.

~

CARMINE STREET POOL

I was on my way to meet someone a few blocks
south of the area I used to haunt
in Greenwich Village, took the IRT a stop past

Christopher to Varick and there it loomed,
like an ancient amphitheater, but not in ruins—
the hangout she so often alluded to going to. I

never went. My aversion was complete:
even after she and I were long
finished, and I had gone back to live

in a neighborhood I loved, I never
once caught sight of the sign CARMINE STREET POOL
that blazed out with a faded grandeur.

Now I saw her slouching in with the catch-all straw bag
she had earlier purchased in Mexico slung over her shoulder,
lying there on a towel in all her tawny allure

to be ogled by "older men"(approaching forty)
whom she "liked to go with because their sexual demands were less,"
and male models who "weren't gay";

her element—though she never mentioned swimming—:
only men, men who would not impinge or demand or inflict...
so she could keep the necessary distance.

On the few nights in Mexico either she had come
or I was delusional, she had an answer
over omelets, "yes..., I was so turned on

by the [male] lead in [such and such] movie...;
and the night after we were let go
after our abduction by the cops and near

incarceration in a Mexican
jail, she became—like a spirit set free.
Maybe danger was her true element.

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