April is National Poetry Month, an appropriate time, I hope, for me to contribute an original poem.

My offering concerns my father who, in the late ’50s, worked summers cleaning the swimming pools. I was 11 or 12 years old, and he dragged me along — believe me, I didn’t go willingly — to help him. I wanted to hang out with my friends, and I especially hated working at the homes of female classmates. I wanted to be swimming in the pools, not cleaning them. You know how kids are.

One hot summer evening we cleaned the filter at the country club pool. When we’d finished, we watched heat lightning flash over the Chesapeake, and I noticed that my pupils closed instantly after every flash of light and that for a moment there was complete darkness.

Cleaning Pools

(to my father)

That summer you hired out to clean swimming pools

up and down Delmarva in your Willys truck,

the back end clanking with pumps and pipes,

cans of HTH, diatomaceous earth and alum,

and hauled me along to skim from the chlorined

waters hopeless, deluded toads and the clotted

bodies of insects.

I was ten that summer but can remember

how the surface of each pool was a surprise,

the water still clear or gone cloudy,

the blue bottoms flecked with algae

and the shimmering coins I retrieved for baloney

sandwiches and sodas at the Royal Oak Grocery.

You’d place a hand on my shoulder and say,

“Dive deep and get us that lunch money.”

It’s been fifty years, but I often think of

those days, the hundred-pound drums we toted,

the pump vomiting brown water, the ninety-nine

degree afternoons spent rolling rubber paint

on the walls of concrete craters — and especially

the empty tonic glasses, their sprigs of sere mint,

the careless underwear, the brown grass beneath

a mildewed towel some rich kid discarded.

Do you recall that August afternoon at the Talbot

County Country Club, the thirty-six filter bags

we pulled and laundered, the steel rings so tight

our fingers bled? It was s five-hour job

And when the bags and screens were back in place,

you dropped a pipe wrench clanging to the

bottom.

It was five more hours in the high beams

and neither of us spoke till the filter

lid was clamped and screwed down tight,

then we leaned against the truck and shared

a warm soda. Sheet lightning streaked

over the Chesapeake, I began to notice

how after each flash, I went momentarily blind.

“It’s strange,” you said, finally, and without

my having spoken a word, “How quickly the pupil

closes to the light and how complete the

darkness is. It must be like dying.”

Tonight I watch a storm gather over Carolina,

the lightning so intense the billowing undersides

of clouds are illumined from horizon to horizon,

each flash stealing me into shadow. Perhaps,

as you said, it is like death, this sudden light

and inevitable darkness. Or perhaps it is the

purest grace. It says what fathers and sons

mostly cannot say: it is the quick chill of a hand

on my shoulder, it is like plunging deep

into the pure, blue waters of the rich.