After Hockney

8:45 the sky gracklecolored thinnest crescent moon,

the only real light underwater in the pool 15 people are swimming in,

well more lolling most of them:

my friends, and their children,

and some people from the neighborhood I don’t know.

They wear their selfhoods lightly in the water:

an old man probing with a stick down the dark ridge.

Further off pink mercury vapor turns things comic book colors,

here is only inner-lit water moving off in waves changing color from whiteblue

               starlight through half polished lapis down to midnight,

reflective pulsing intersecting planes in thirty-second notes,

shifting colorshape intricately,

also taking these bodies under the surface fragmenting attenuating them

almost like they’re synching in and out of time

all of their faces motionless on the surface tilted back eyes closed,

hair wet,

faces aimed at the sky their bodies underneath them now prismatic tadpoles

fading off into the brightness,

dark almost everywhere else all round,