What a splashy entrance
Your cheery ghost arranged
On the night stage of my mind:
Abruptly through a doorway
And spruced up to the nines
In a Chesapeake Bay blue suit!
Can’t say you hadn’t changed—
I’d never seen that sugar
Sprinkled through your crewcut.
I knew you, though, at once
(That rolling gait was your way):
My college swimming coach,
Jim McAdoo from Philly.

“Jimmy!” I blurted. “Ridland!”
“You remembered?” “Great to see you!”
“You’re looking great!” “Been swimming?”
“Been swimming––look at these––”
My dingy second places
Collected yesterday
(They’d made me feel like spitting)
In shabby backstroke races
Through which I’d thrashed and blundered
And come that close to quitting.

“That’s wonderful!” you mumbled,
“Just wonderful!” and grinned,
And yesterday’s black wind
That flapped the backstroke flags
Out flat as ravens’ wings
Suddenly dropped and thinned,
Warmed into the benign
Sun-sweetened afternoon
Of a Commencement June.

One fucked-up, faraway
Home-meet Saturday
You rolled in half-seas-over,
Tie cockeyed, eyes half-shut.
We could’ve had your buttIf
we’d have raised a fuss,
But who’d throw that crap at you?
Potter and Snyder sat you
Down in the offstage office
To keep you out of hearing—
Spluttering lavish praise,
Abject apologies—
And ran the team themselves.
I think we even won,
Though if we didn’t—so?

Swim coaches nowadays
Tend to be trim technicians,
Not chubby Irishmen
Come rumbling down from Philly
To keep us in the water
Just mumbling, “Wonderful!”
And twenty-some years later,
When one old swimmer needed
That “Wonderful!” that night
Sprucing right up to heed it.