The Rhine: Following Europe's Greatest River from Amsterdam to the Alps I didn't quite know where to look, and spent a lot of time feigning interest in the ceiling.” I was almost certainly the only person who wasn't retired, and there were (to put it politely) more raisins on display than grapes. Yet despite the mixing of the sexes, the atmosphere was reassuringly chaste. A group of older men sat talking about football in the hot tub, and a pair of middle-aged women were busily planning someone else's wedding while swimming lengths in the icy main pool. The biggest surprise was that men and women were mixing freely not just in the pools but in the showers and changing rooms too, all as happily naked as the day they first drew breath. No one ran screaming, although I did get a big smile and a wink from a bearish, Russian-looking man twice my age, and wondered briefly if I'd strayed into the wrong kind of bathhouse. Would the other patrons run screaming if I stripped off? Or would they run screaming if I didn't? I eventually decided to assimilate as best as I could, and marched to the poolside dressed as God made me, flinging my towel aside with carefree abandon.
Cowering between the changing rooms and the pool, I spent ten anguished minutes trying to decide whether to keep my swimming trunks on or risk taking them off. “Several years of living in the Netherlands had reduced my innate English prudishness somewhat, but I still suffered from a typical Englishman's angst at public nudity.
Height of the spruce-night and heave of the far mountain, he sees Inclemency of sky or slur of the world's weather Her out-goings and in-comings, from whatever He had such strength, he would put his hand forthĪnd maintain it over her to guard, in all She moves, and in his heart he cries out that, if only Upward where, though not visible, he knows The lattice of dusk-dripping leaves, whitenessĭimly glimmers, goes. Moves up the path that, stair-steep, winds Holding it there hieratic as lost Egypt and erect, The towel about her body, under her breasts, and, With a motion as though standing in sleep, Subsumes all other, and sequential, moments, by which This moment is non-sequential and absolute, and admits With the towel now trailing loose from one hand, isĪ white stalk from which the face flowers gravely toward the high sky. The metallic and abstract severity of water, lifts. To draw to itself, and condense in its whiteness, what light Profiled against the darkness of spruces, seems With face lifted toward the high sky, where Slowly draws it back and forth across back and buttocks, but Self she may be, and with an end of the towel grasped in each hand, The body is erect, she is herself, whatever
The pure curve of their weight and buttocks How, with that posture of female awkwardness that is,Īnd is the stab of, suddenly perceived grace, breasts bulge down in Rise, and in the abrupt and unsustaining element of air, The body that is marked by his use, and Time's,
The new-curdling night of spruces, nakedness Her motion has fractured it to shivering splinters of silver, “Season late, day late, sun just down, and the skyĬold gunmetal but with a wash of live rose, and she,
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