Saturdays with Marilyn  

We float on the pool all afternoon, weightless, reading,
our minds in other times and places,
a toe against a wall sending us off
in other directions in a world slowly turning,
the sun over our shoulders now, and again in our faces,
listening without attending to a pump that could be
the sound of the ocean, aware of time only as shade
moving across the pool, and the hungry dog barking.
We are worlds the ants find and we send them swimming.

We pass each other, gently bumping now and then,
a togetherness of sympathetic rest,
a pause in years of joint and several lives
like islands that are parts of a single country,
separate universes, contradictory in terms,
but united in a fate that could have ancient roots.
Nothing is certain, they say, but attraction beats science.
Momentum and a breeze, energies that seem pointless,
are saving mercies in the last weeks of August.