Heat Dome

We swam in the lake at 10 a.m.
before it grew too hot,
the five of us—
two divorced parents,
our teenagers, my mother—
at the little public access
where the neighbour with the tennis courts
has a lakeside infinity pool.
I’ve a spider bite
on my hip
the exact pinks of the wildfire
smoke-filtered
sunlight. In Similkameen and Osoyoos and Penticton,
the ashes of Catholic churches
can’t cool.
Spider-bite-sky.
Rashy light.
In Xanadu, did Kubla Khan
A stately pleasure-dome decree,
is what I remember
most vividly from Grade 12 poetry.
Infinity is when it never ends. We swam out
to the nearest buoy,
a white and pink ball on the surface
of the lake. We followed its shadowy chain down
to a shadowy slab of concrete
in the milfoil at 15 feet
What is pleasure
without an ending. When the spider bit me
I didn’t feel anything. Back on the beach
on our slip of public property,
beneath a bower of maple trees
we were cool. How could we be
happy, we asked,
but we were
happy. The spider bite had its own source
of heat. It was something
inside me.