There’s a cleanly spoken, elegant poem in Poetry, May 2025, that lingers in the mind’s eye. It’s called “Infinity Pool” by Vona Groarke. 

You flirt with an arresting occurrence in the liminal paralysis of semi-sleep. It nags. If not worded somehow, in your fully woken state it will have flown the coop. In Vona Groarke’s voice:

I had it in the night, the image,
but lacked the energy or will
to magic my body through
my own fourth wall and lower
myself, spit-spot, into the page.

Memory makes a stab, furrowing its brow. A visual conceit verges on recollection at a “just about” level of evanescence, like the lacery in foam etched on sand by a beached roller.

But I saw, I just about recall,
a blue rectangle not quite blank
held up against blue sky, blue sea
so you weren’t supposed to tell
the edge, the stitching, or the seams.

Say, a collage! The vision has coalesced into color, shape, backdrop: blue, primary hue that confines itself to distances; a shape with sides and corners, perceptibly edgeless; sky, sea.

“Infinity pool” is what it is — a luxuriant spa fixture, feat of engineered tomfoolery, extrapolated to an origami-like reminder pocketed for cherishing. I was stranded in the metaphysical until I caught the drift.

And I am folding it now, this pool,
corner to corner, line to line,
so as to carry about with me
its deep blue scrap of  lie.

Artfully deflating, conclusive irony: 

But carrying folded water
isn’t feasible. You know that.

Who’s “you”? Me? The poem talking to itself? The abrupt interpolation teases. What makes us human is eked out on scraps of lie, on our “knowing” the unreasonable — the ever-loving “hidden” and its haunted relatives. We carry water for our illusions. We feed them hermeneutically. They float somewhere beyond feasible, retrievable in our confabulations. I can’t say enough about “Infinity Pool” by Vona Groarke, or anything really. It’s damn near perfect.

(c) 2025 JMN — EthicalDative. All rights reserved