Pool Boy Idyll I

Come, O Gladiolus! Thyrsis! Daphnis! Steve!
It’s the height of the flourishing day,
The pool’s all gone a kind of crisp blue Hockney.
We stand beneath the pergola with nets,
And shirts that smell of chlorine Capistrano,
Pergamon, a temple kept mum, patio
Intaglio, sing me a lay, fat fabulo:
I bet you a pig, a fine specimen
Not porcelain porcine but said Zeuxis
Real as grapes, shallow end bathing baldly,
As if nothing, as if Los Angeles
Did not lie on a pectoral fault line,
Graved deadly into the earth, seismics,
Sonatas, no minor keys, tremulos
But a good fat blunt of a song, summer
Sunscreen smelt and already tipping over.