Part 1. of Jarad Bruinstroop’s triptych, “Pool Sweet, 2019”, is charged with risk and tempered by an understated bathos. Drawing associations between the Transfiguration of Jesus, one of the New Testament’s most important miracles and a major Christian feast day, and David Hockney’s Peter Getting out of Nick’s Pool, is exciting, transgressive and, the poem proposes, suitably inadequate. Hockney’s painting is “less mesmerising” and “less glorious” than the Transfiguration, and this deficiency prevents us access to notions as sublime and aspirational as “heaven” and “the future,”—we are, in Hockney’s painting, inescapably in the material present. But, the poem confirms, “This is how it should be.”
The poem’s brilliance lies in its suggestive power; it is rich with potential allusions. When we consider Hockney’s nude Peter getting out of the pool as a substitute for the Transfiguration, we not only think about the potential for the naked human figure to be holy and sexual desire as divine, but also the Apostle Peter. In the lines “To get out of a pool / is to capitulate / to gravity”, Bruinstroop seems to invert the story of St. Peter, who, while walking on water in imitation of Christ, sinks because of his wavering faith. In the closing stanza, Bruinstroop calls to mind the ritual of Christian baptism.
Jarad Bruinstroop is a writer who lives in Meanjin (Brisbane). His debut poetry collection, Reliefs, won the 2022 Thomas Shapcott Poetry Prize. As the 2022 University of Queensland Fryer Library Creative Writing Fellow, he is developing a novella cycle that draws on Brisbane’s Queer history and the Fryer Library special collections. In 2023, he won the Val Vallis Award. His work has appeared in Best of Australian Poetry, Meanjin, Overland, HEAT, Island, Westerly, TEXT, Cordite, Australian Poetry Journal, Rabbit and elsewhere. He holds a PhD in Creative Writing from QUT where he also teaches.
From “Pool Sweet, 2019”
After David Hockney’s Peter Getting out of Nick’s Pool (1966)
1. Peter Floating (1998). Watercolour on acetate.
If instead of trudging after Jesus
up the mountain, St James had sat
in a dark art classroom
and watched the procession
of masterpieces until he saw
Peter Getting out of Nick’s Pool
projected on the wall,
the light would have been
less mesmerising. No more
a flash of lightning than a match
struck. And the glory,
oh the glory, would have been
a good deal less glorious.
They wouldn’t call it
the Transfiguration
and nobody would speak
about heaven or the future.
This is as it should be.
To get out of a pool
is to capitulate
to gravity. But to get in.
To get into a pool
Is to put your faith
In the water
Go to Source
Author: Thomas Moody
