By Brian David Crawford

How my father gets into the pool:
not right away.

He waits on the chaise lounge
until he gets good and hot.

He and my mother
wait together for the heat.

Their bodies share a thermostat.
When it hits the limit they take a dip.

I apply sunblock to my father’s face.
The cream gets stuck in the crevices

around his nose. He waves
me away as I try to rub it in.

My mother and I
are reading the same novel.

She’s a hundred
pages ahead.

Don’t tell me
what happens next, I say.

I don’t want to know
until I get there.

Words pass between them and they rise
and drift over to the chrome ladder.

He goes in first, then she.
My father holds out his open hands

behind her as she descends
one rung at a time

placing her soles
on the cool, submerged metal.

Together in their sunglasses and hats
they look up at me, still on dry land.

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Brian David Crawford teaches at the Georg August Universität in Göttingen. His poems have also appeared in Gulf Coast, and his poetry has received support from the Seamus Heaney Poetry Summer School in Belfast. He recently served as guest editor of The New American Studies Journal’s special issue on North American poets in Berlin.