I.
All season the lake
wore different dresses:
a thick gray one like
a supplicant’s, or a frothy
light green one to dance in.
I approached her
from around a curve.
She could make herself
almost coy, then reveal
her new aspect:
a navy blue gown.
I liked to see her
break wide open
and spray the shore rocks:
I wouldn’t do that.
Or after a storm
she withdrew in clouded
and bruise-colored silks,
unusually placid. Like a girl
walking into a field,
leaving the lit house.
Every morning I ran by,
taking exercise, rounding
the turn where I glimpsed her
again: first through leaves,
then fully exposed
to the sky, the ore boats, bees,
shrill gulls, that summer
music. What would she say,
and would I respond?
I wondered. Every morning,
going there. Coming back.
II.
The lid of a cooler, flung from a truck.
A curl of brown bark, ripped from a logger’s cargo.
Somebody’s wedding photos, tucked into a paper folder
labeled “MOM.” An unused roll of black electrical tape,
flung from a truck. Somebody’s sunglasses, scratched,
scratched beyond usefulness (from bouncing?).
A hairband. A woman’s comb. One
white athletic sock, laundered but unworn.
A chunk of split firewood, flung from a truck.
Many beer cans, one of them set tenderly upright
at the shoulder’s verge: more taste! less filling!
And the green glass, the brown glass, shattered…
Lanyards. A gas cap, settled among the asters.
The dog in the back of a red pickup barking, his song
chasing him along the wide curve of the highway.
(III.
One by one, the photos
give up the shine-browed bride
and her sweating groom,
the reception line, the people
clutching their printed napkins
at the reception, which reveal
the date (June 29),
no names, there’s no sense
that Mom would drop
these snapshots
out of her speeding car
on the way to Duluth
skirting the lake’s north shore.
That’s the ugliest cake
I’ve ever seen. You saved
the life of these pictures: now
they’ll stay with you
for good. Won’t they.)
IV.
Keep running. For every drunk
who drives towards you on the shoulder,
thinking it’s funny, there’s a heron
stock-still in the ditchwater, watching you;
there’s a dog glad of the company
in the two-mile stretch of his territory, panting,
his tongue like a squire’s pennant.
Exchange. For every exhaust-spewing semi
whose wind-wake blasts you, there’s
a sudden field of clover, waving
fragrant alongside; there’s the cry
(unmistakable) of a pileated
woodpecker you’d never have heard, and these
are precious things. Of the distances
disappearing under your footfalls:
say nothing. Run. Deny. Embrace—
Originally published in Cider Press Review, Volume 1.
