from Glacier Lake (2020)
Write an ode to a memorable bad date.
Dedication:
To Jacqueline, who shared our misadventure and put up with my invention in its retelling. —- PK
Glacier Lake
The moon in the bureau mirror
looks out a million miles. – Elizabeth Bishop
The Cabin
Who sleeps at these heights?
Not you or I this night.
This air’s too thin
for any mountain greenhorn
abecedarian, or anyone
up off the trail
and out of oxygen.
-<>-
Out of their element
two fish heave in bed,
their lungs deracine.
In a split mirror a dead moon’s
bone-white stare
is refracted twice or is it thrice?
from its source to us.
-<>-
And the sun on a dead moon
on an alpine lake at night is awesome
and dreadful, is it not,
on our eyes and in our minds?
as we lie cold on cold,
cold equals with one share of it
and wide awake.
-<>-
Evicted
“It’s homelessness to be evicted
from your dreams.”
“Misery craves company,
but insomnia observing itself
has nowhere to go.”
-<>-
Bookish refractions
make what sense I have
of sense tonight, and so:
“Make greater sense!” I said,
then briskly making less of it
proposed we take, “Shall we?”
a moonlit stroll down to the lake.
“That dead-eye moon, so bright on all we see,
will be our guide tonight.”
-<>-
And you, past sleep
and all cold hope of it,
rose slowly out of bed.
“How sensible!” you said,
“each step we take down slope
makes idiots of both of us!”
“This night air’s too thin,
and silence here’s a creeping thing!”
(A footfall snaps a twig.)
“I’m plain creeped out!” you whispered,
“everything’s awake!
And, look, that stalker moon’s
still flitting through the trees,
as it sits out on that lake,
just as you please! I swear
the lake too is watching us!”
-<>-
The Lake
Is Glacier Lake an eye,
or, for that matter, is the moon?
Stay close a few more steps:
see, here it lies, no is, a lake insensate
as it’s always been; vestigial thing
that neither sees nor sleeps,
observes nothing of its surface or depths,
not the wind on it, nor the distant sky,
nor the watery refractions of
sun, moon, stars, O,
observant only in their spheres.
Nor in its waters deep below,
there the unblinking trout,
well-stocked cutthroat, big ones
nosing about, a caster’s joy
when they’re not outthinking us.
-<>-
Along the Levee
None of this does the lake observe;
it’s after all an alpine lake,
photogenic to the eye, but no
insomniac, as you and I,
to the moon and stars tonight
or to what goes on in it.
Nor by this September moon,
well-waxed and gibbous,
to the sight of us, as we edged out
along the levee on the eastern shore,
while gazing at the choreography
of a zany waterspout, cavorting
out of thin air on the lake
amid escorting showers of
what looked like water-devil pixie dust!,
you said, which sounds ridiculous,
but glittering anyway above the swirling spout.
-<>-
Then, as if spotting us,
(not to overstrain credulity),
it took a sweeping turn in our direction,
zig-zagging the moon path,
skating through it this way and that,
skimming it with flash and flair
nearly upon us, then vanishing
before our eyes.
-<>-
“Still not observing us?” you said,
as we stopped dread-footed
in our moonstruck tracks
by a thing other than the spout:
an unexpected reek --
sour, rancid, sickly sweet --
of a bull moose in rutting season,
a gust of it from the trees ahead,
bathing us in an air stream of urine,
in which he had, I’d later read,
quite thoroughly bathed himself
in a shallow trough to attract females,
but not the one following behind me
caught too in his perfumery.
-<>-
“Vile!” you said. “Sewage,” said I,
not as convincingly, recalling
the big bull Cousin John,
the family fisherman, spotted yesterday
on the shore near here, flashing
his moosey stuff and antler span.
-<>-
Sewage,” I said again,
but you knew we’d been observed
by the lake, so to speak,
for you too saw the heart-shaped tracks
edged sharply at our feet,
as we backed slowly out of there,
praying we would not see him
in his blindness sensing us,
and worse, his suddenness,
the hooved rush, tremendous rack
and flaring snout, closing the gap.
-<>-
“Moose bait” came to mind
along with abject fear and cowering
and death certain by predation.
“Bull shit!” I heard you say,
almost diviningly, it turned out,
about the sewage smell,
as you let loose a three-stage yell,
as if blind-sided by the devil:
first a gasp, then a whoop and squeal,
almost musical, then in notes
gutteral and descending.
-<>-
Came You On Another Thing
For off the levee,
a backward step or two,
came you on another thing,
squishy underfoot,
on which you slid and fell,
bass ackwards over t’kettle
onto a pile of night soil,
unchi-kun, fecal squid,
call it what you will,
but curled and glistening
fish-white in the moonlight,
slippery and congealing,
until you touched down on it
and skidded.
-<>-
Coyote or big cat scat?
its residue a smeared palette,
ground bones and bits of hair,
at least one solid meal of it.
What matter then which predator
shat on the trail behind us
as we backed out of there?
-<>-
I had glanced the other way,
out along the levee,
before you slipped and fell,
so stumbled back into a snarl
of wet scat smell and female fury
worthy of each animal,
which you carried up the trail,
as the night heard your complaint
echoing royally on the lake,
and how was that not eloquent?
Your way of saying, if it would print,
“I followed you! Now I’m feculent!
-<>-
Not to split hairs with you,
because you wore it with such flair,
but what you wore uphill this night
was not merely fecal smear
but nature’s piss and shite and kill
from heels to hair.
-<>-
And What of Love
So ends our noisome tale
of a midnight by a moonlit lake.
And what of love? O sleepless love,
when ordure, not ardor, comes to bed,
and all essence in the rose has fled,
when its too much nose you’ve had
in another’s neighborhood?
-<>-
So, this night, because we must
(in this you left no choice,
and there’s an empty rub),
we’ve left romancery to the moose
and love’s perfumery too,
though his also covers us
and will not scrub.
—<>—
A waterspout cavorting on a lake:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HLXIZhd6m_0