In the beautiful double light of the pond,
our day together has seemed more
than a single day, and now the sunset
clouds of the pond’s second sky stretch
all the way from our dock chairsto Lucy Point, which had no name
until Lucy, Bob and Rita’s dog, began
swimming ahead of them to reach it.
Imagine that the pond, which gradually
deepens the red of our sky, remembers
another sky, where the three of them
swim together for the first time,
unaware of the likeness beneath them.
Imagine this is the pond taking them in
with the wide, unblinking eye of its
perpetual knowing and remembering,
where all the days are one day. Here
is the loon that left behind the small, white
after-image of its breast, here above a brown
shadow is the beaver slowly moving
its nose-print. Around it is a darkening
twilight like ours, decades ago, when
the ghost of Harland Hutchinson,
on the roof of the pond’s original camp,
brings his hammer down in silence
making the delayed echo of each blow,
which is the pond listening and storing
the sound away in its pond mind. There,
my love, if you can imagine, it is always
twilight, and always the morning after
the hard freeze when long-dead Caroline
Barlach, up from New York City to winter
in her godforsaken shack and write the great
American novel, bends toward the hole
she has cut in the ice for water to creat,
unknown to her, a shaggy, unforgettable
cameo of her face. For nothing in the quick
double-knowing of the pond is ever lost,
though on this night as the wind comes up,
the single cry of a loon falls away
somewhere beyond Lucy Point,
and the reflection of the pines that rim
the pond darkens around us, and the ghosts
of you and me, barely visible off our dock,
break apart on waves beside a shifting moon. |
