POEM September 8th 2020

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With Emma at the Ladies-Only Swimming Pond on Hampstead Heath

 

In payment for those mornings at the mirror while,

at her

expense, I’d started my late learning in Applied

 

French Braids, for all

the mornings afterward of Hush

and Just stand still,

 

to make some small amends for every reg-

iment-

ed bathtime and short-shrifted goodnight kiss,

 

I did as I was told for once,

gave up

my map, let Emma lead us through the woods

 

“by instinct,” as the drunkard knew

the natural

prince. We had no towels, we had

 

no “bathing costumes,” as the children’s novels

call them here, and I

am summer’s dullest hand at un-

 

premeditated moves. But when

the coppice of sheltering boxwood

disclosed its path and posted

 

rules, our wonted bows to seemliness seemed

poor excuse.

The ladies in their lumpy variety lay

 

on their public half-acre of lawn,

the water

lay in dappled shade, while Emma

 

in her underwear and I

in an ill-

fitting borrowed suit availed us of

 

the breast stroke and a modified

crawl.

She’s eight now. She will rather

 

die than do this in a year or two

and lobbies,

even as we swim, to be allowed to cut

 

her hair. I do, dear girl, I will

give up

this honey-colored metric of augmented

 

thirds, but not (shall we climb

on the raft

for a while?) not yet.

 

Linda Gregerson

 

Linda Gregerson is particularly fond of using the poetic form the tercet- a poetic unit of three lines, rhymed or unrhymed. She wrote that she found the form advantageous because, “the tercets were the first formal vehicle I found that seemed to me to be properly flexible, and true. Especially important was that second, deeply indented line, the ‘pivot line’ as I conceived it, often only a single metrical foot long. It gave me a kind of skeletal resistance, something that syntax could work against, and thus it became a true generative proposition, not just a kind of packaging. The lineation produced the poem.”

She usually deliberately justifies the poem to left.

 

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