After Hockney

8:45 the sky gracklecolored thinnest crescent moon,

the only real light underwater

in the pool where twenty people swim, O.K. well loll most of them:

my friends, and their children,

and some people from the neighborhood I don't know.

They wear their selfhoods lightly in the water:

an old man probing with a stick down the dark ridge.

Distantly mercury vapor lamps turn their cars color supplement colors,

here only inner-lit water moving off in waves changing

from whiteblue Rigellian actinic down through half polished lapis to midnight, reflective intersecting planes in thirty-second notes

shifting colorshape intricately,

taking these bodies under the surface fragmenting attentuating them

almost like they're synching in and out of time

my friends, their children, the unknowns their faces

motionless on the surface tilted back eyes closed,

hair wet,

faces aimed at the sky underneath them their bodies now prismatic

tadpoles fading off into the brightness,

dark everywhere else all round,

This is the Dreamtime in these provinces