Palinode at The Oasis
At the pool
all of the boys out
on
the sun terrace
sunning themselves
smoking
checking
their Grindr
Because of that one interaction
we had in the fast lane
I believe you and I might now
be in love
Whoops
Let’s get nasty in the changing rooms
All of us —
flexing our muscles
And somebody over there
is doing tai chi
But you wouldn’t believe the kinds
of flowers
I’ve got going on on my balcony, bro
For real
Back at my place
All of us
imagining
that being outwardly
strong
is the same thing
as having something on the inside
that could fly
like that guy does
when he
becomes a beast
in the water
I’ve been swimming at the Oasis pool for some years now (I believe since ~2018, when my partner discovered it whilst working at a nearby ice cream parlour). I’d first heard about the pool from godfather, who’d told me how he used to sunbathe there in the 1980s, and had mentioned its vaguely cruisey vibes at the time. I’d forgotten about it — perhaps I hadn’t really been paying proper attention — and then a few years later, in my mid-20s, when I was living in a house in Archway, I began to swim there myself.
Swimming pools, and in particular outdoor ones, have a somewhat compelling atmosphere which makes them conducive to poetry and to dreaming. There are long afternoons spent lounging beside the pool where time slips away or seems to become elastic and different, when one struggles to account for the moments that have passed. I remember being in a bookshop in Cambridge whilst I was a student there and picking up a copy of David Foster Wallace’s short story collection Brief Interviews with Hideous Men. I stood reading in the bookshop, totally mesmerised by the story Forever Overhead, which recounts a boy’s dive into an outdoor pool in dreamtime slow-mo, “a bleached sweet salt, a flower with chemical petals”. I remember wishing that I could write like that, with such heady intensity and mystery and and an almost clairvoyant beauty and power.
The original version of this poem — which I did actually write as I was sitting on the Oasis sundeck in this week’s heatwave in the South-East of England — had an extra stanza at the end; I removed it to give the poem a more brutal feel and to try less hard to wring a meaning or a “point” out of the work. Other than that, this piece is largely unchanged from when I first wrote it. I love swimming and it does make me feel somewhat out of touch with my surrounds, particularly on a hot day in June.
A note on the title: the title of this poem was inspired by the introduction to the Robin Waterfield translation of Plato’s Phaedrus, which I’ve been re-reading lately. In his introduction, Waterfield refers to Socrates’ third and final speech in Phaedrus as a “palinode”, which — according to Google — “[is] a poem in which the poet retracts a view or sentiment expressed in a former poem.” In his palinode, Socrates ardently expresses the view that love can mean something more than érōs, which Waterfield describes wonderfully as “a longing capable of satisfaction”.
In order fully to praise love, Plato felt that he had to explain its place in the metaphysical life of a human being. The palinode is about the soul; everything is either about the soul or is introduced to explain what the soul is and does (or can do) […] [t]he suggestion is that we won’t understand human experience unless it is put into a much larger context, and that the experience of love is essential for a human being to fulfil his higheset potential.
I find this writing beautiful, and compelling. I wanted to capture for myself something of this sentiment that “the palinode is about the soul…”, that our understanding of human experience is one that comes from a position of our own spiritual poverty. There is more to life than the material world, and Socrates wants to argue for it.
I also liked the slightly humorous tint given to this poem by naming it as a palinode. There is something glossy and superficial about pool life — city life — in the sweltering summers, everybody showing off and attempting to see or be seen, which I am both drawn to and feel apart from. It is from this tension between inwardness and outwardness that the poem arose. By calling it a palinode, I guess that I felt a need to gesture towards a certain attitude of retraction or perhaps hesitation which is present in the makeup of the poem, as well as the poet’s relationship to its subject.
Dear reader, I sincerely hope that you enjoy it and take something of your own away from it <3
Also this week: I wrote a short series of “sketches” whilst watching a concert by Sultan Stevenson and his brilliant ensemble, at the Pizza Express Jazz Café in Soho. You can check out the full post on my Instagram account here, and listen to Sultan’s debut album here. Many thanks again to him for his wonderful music, and for re-sharing my post on IG.
Lastly, the two photos at the top of the article were taken by the marvellous Pedro Younis, go check out his Instagram.