It isn’t all it seems, figuring out you’ve married a lifeguard.
I’m not talking about Bay Watch. My wife isn’t
Pamela Anderson jogging Santa Monica in slow motion
Skintight red one piece Speedo. Marrying a lifeguard
Is so unlike my late mother’s fourth husband Ralph’s fantasy.
(He’d stare at Bay Watch reruns in the afternoons with his
Trail mix and vodka and tonic and claim he came for the stories.)
My wife is a lifeguard who does her job and does it well.
No funny business. No fooling around. There she is now.
Perched on one of those pretty high white wooden chairs
That look so uncomfortable and yet are so comfortingly
Familiar to all in need of assistance. I am reminded
That lifeguards do not dive in to play in the waves. Her task
Is to remain up there In her white wooden chair, observing behaviors.
She’s watching to make sure I don’t go past the boundary.

Daniel Morris is author of eight books on twentieth- and twenty-first century poetry and visual culture, editor or coeditor of five essay collections, and author of four books of poetry. Recent titles include Not Born Difital (Bloomsbury), Blue Poles (Marsh Hawk Press), a paperback reissue of his study of Nobel Laureate Louise Glück (University of Missouri Press), Essays and Interviews on Contemporary American Poets, Poetry, and Pedagogy: A Thirty-Year Creative Reading Workshop, and, as editor, The Cambridge Companion to American Poetry and Politics since 1900.