At the community swimming pool the dives are all terrible.
There’s the front flip that looks like a folded chair being thrown
Into the water, the cannonball by a fat kid holding his nose,
one leg stretched out, the other tucked up against his stomach.
There’s the girl who stands there three minutes before doing
a back dive who collapses like a dead tree, not quiet
making it around, sending water like a whip against the pool.
There are also people who think they are good divers who do
a simple front dive trying to rip an entrance, and are still bad
by any credible, critical assessment.
Then there are the kids who run out to the end of the board
and fling their bodies in some kind of sideways “Arabian” flip
only to land on their sides, pin-wheeling their way into the water.
Some people twist like they are on a trampoline. Best of all
I like the little girl who bends way down almost touching the surface
of the water holding her hand in prayer anticipating the next
dreadful moment.
Then there are those who simply jump in feet first, but that’s not
really diving all. On television, at the Olympics, they always show
the diver turning over underwater, kicking his way
back to the surface though the bubbly, Steuben glass of water.
There’s even a device to measure the height of the splash
There’s the classic swan dive, which actually isn’t a good dive
because there’s too much arch in the back.
In platform diving they have someone down below splashing
the water so you can tell where the surface is.
“A difficult thing done gracefully” is what it’s all about.
If not that, then the cannonball, which gets everyone wet.
The little girl poised at the end of the board somehow hits
the water with her hands and feet at about the same time
in an inverted “V’ like a duck if a duck had both arms and legs.
How many good, classic movies ended with the guests
In informal wear (think the Marx Brothers) throwing each other
into the pool after a wedding followed by lawn-chairs, umbrellas,
and finally the cake itself?
In the last scene the camera pans out to the bride swimming
ashore in her long white dress, and then, over the scroll
of the credits, there’s a car driving away dragging a fleet
of rattling tin cans.
Ray Hadley has published poems in the Sierra Nevada Review, Edge, and many other magazines throughout the country. He owns Keynote Used Records and Books in South Lake Tahoe.
