Investigations At The Public Baths Poem by Allen Curnow

At nine fifteen a.m.
on the first day of his eighty-
first year. Why don't I

first-person myself?
I was hoping nobody would ask
me that question

yet. The strong smell of
chlorine for one thing, one thing
at a time, please.

For instance, there's always
this file of exercyclists
riding the gallery

over the pool. Bums
on saddles, pommelled crotches.
The feet rotate, the

hands grip, or hang
free, or hold open a book,
demonstrating how

the mind is improved
without progression, if not without
rumbling noises and

lascivious absences.
How free-standing engines enjoy
their moving parts.

privately mounted
overhead. There's also the deep
and the shallow end

between which the body
swims and the mind, totally
immersed, counts

and keeps count. I think
sixteen, touch tiles, turn again,
with underwater eyes

follow the black line.
Touch, thinking seventeen, turn
thinking eighteen

and enough. Whatever's
thinkable next or only the peg
where I last hang

my clothes. A destination.
The gallery rumble-trembles, the riders
always up there were

an abstraction blooded, a
frieze the wrong side of the urn.
One grins, catching
me looking, lifts
a tattooed hand. I wave back. So.
You know how it is.