Alan Walowitz – Boys’ Swim (1964)

Walowitz LE P&W 4 Nov-Dec 2024

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Live Encounters Poetry & Writing Volume Four November-December 2024

Boys’ Swim (1964), poems by Alan Walowitz.


Boys’ Swim (1964)

Short, tall, black, white, freckled or not,
slightly flushed, blushing bright,
some cheeks newly-nicked
by their pop’s Gillette.
Some a bit older, here to finish up, but for this class–
and maybe a wayward math. Meantime,
tending a goatee, odd hairs here and there
straggling from pimpled chins.
Mostly crew-cuts left from olden days,
a few slick-back DAs from earlier still,
nonchalant enough in pose
though would mightily strive–
no matter the instruction–
to keep their hair above the water line.

We lined up naked next to the pool,
our eyes, of necessity, riveted ahead,
and not a clue what to do with our hands.
One clown tried to break us with a mouth-fart.
Coach Smith was old, couldn’t hear so well,
or knew enough not to use his rabbit-ears,
though he flashed a quick, harsh look
as far behind as his neck let his bald head get.
He’d been through the war, still limped a bit
and teen asses, goose-fleshed, were nothing
compared to what he’d seen–
as he strode between us and the pool’s edge
on his way to the podium.
Attendance sheet beneath his arm,
he twirled his whistle on a chain,
but had no ill-intent.
Was enough that we were here,
though only God might know
what sin we had committed by age 16,
that being thus ashamed could possibly repay.


Snapshot from
Pomonok Schoolyard (1974)

Play the game; don’t look at me.
In the photo, the basketball screeches
to a cartoon-halt, the way nature never let it,
and holds the eye of every player
as if it were a stillborn promise
no one would ever keep.

But there was one who disobeyed
and mugged for the camera, as was his way.
He was young and figured he’d live forever
—if only he knew it would be
stuffed in an envelope on a shelf
in the cellar where no one much went.

So this is how I get to remember myself
yet forget the names of those I once loved
and casually released like koi in a pond.
Wise enough, at last, to know gone is gone,
but not to purge the places these images reside
like shadows in an empty house.

And she who took this shot?
I couldn’t hold her face when she was there–
memory distorts like a camera when held too close;
She said: Play the game; don’t look at me.
But why can’t I see her clearly now,
a face I promised over and over I would always keep?


© Alan Walowitz

Alan Walowitz lives in the suburbs–Great Neck, NY– and  is a Contributing Editor at Verse-Virtual, an Online Community Journal of Poetry.  His chapbook, Exactly Like Love, comes from Osedax Press.  The full-length, The Story of the Milkman,  is available from Truth Serum Press. From Arroyo Seco Press, the chapbook In the Muddle of the Night, written with poet Betsy Mars. From Red Wolf Journal, download gratis The Poems of the Air.

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