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Poetry Fiction

at the Lake

visibly aged, through the heat and chill of years

its shore a medley of beauty and rough use

soft white sands, green reeds—pockmarked with dry crusts,

half-burnt logs—the dilapidated pier, abandoned skiff

—and odd ephemera, a cigarette holder, long, bright yellow,

you’d think no one but an aging movie star would envy,

and discarded ball point pens, each with a name or message

written across its length, in fading italic green or blue—but now

the holiday crowd has apparently had its fill—heads south with news

that extravagance, once more, has been sighted along the Dixie coast

—while the oil painting you started Fourth of July weekend

remains unfinished (like a wedding cake, someone said) on the easel out back


few seem tuned to its deeper recognitions, but the lake

offers something for each of us, if we only stop, and listen

—it acts out at first, with a pout, perhaps a knowing wag of the head,

very French, then in the evening Scandinavian undertones,

its iridescence lost in shadows, gray bells, games of chess—

later I hear you—”difficult to see it as just a thing one swims across”,

though Queenie thought it a kind of machine, nature’s own, benevolent,

churning out sound and color, just the dose for waywards like us

—all that wonderfully biotic chatter, and in the bargain a diversion for winds

that sometime blow harm’s way across our northern prairies

—for others, perhaps just a boon to the digestion, something optional

like afternoon tea, bucket seats, a side trip to the mountains


in the end none of that really counts for much—

the lake and the sharp waters that replenish

its transparent undertow, from god only knows

what underground source—well,

the distance itself never mattered

as much as the way it soaks through the crush

and finds its way up to light—

like the guardian of a province or

a keeper of the clouds, hung up just so on the edge

of its own reflection, the lake—spread out now at its edges

like a family portrait, deep in the sky’s mysterious mirror—

distills a color as hard to interpret as plain day

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