Footing our cabin’s lawn, before the wood,
awry & uncontaining yet see walls
deep-fissured of concrete
that held their pleasure. Nowadays if you could
bathe, in the far end, you’d be grassy & beat.
Hollyhock falls
& goldenrod to seed. Summer’s fair done
upon this mountain. Give or take a few
New England hundred miles,
this must be Gatsby’s terrible pool, the one
where the Twenties drained out and what we could do—
undefiled, ah nor defiles—
we stood to wonder. The rough bottom’s burst
with frantic plants. On Smith Point, right at the end,
around an older pool
hung over the roaring sea, except in its worst
summers, my friend’s grandmother paddled but sunned
in circuit not, her hat horizontal.
Excerpted from ONLY SING by John Berryman. Edited and with an Introduction by Shane McCrae. Published by Farrar, Straus and Giroux. Copyright © 2025 by Martha Mayou and Sara Lissick. All rights reserved.
