Unless there is a loon cry in a book, the poetry has gone out of it.
—Carl Sandburg
Three loons appear in this poem, two
on one side of the canoe, one
on the other, but
not stable. One drops down
to nothing, emerges two minutes later
twenty feet away, quavering
his black beak’s cold cries
across us to the others like a natural
bridge: oo-AH-hoo. Three loon cries
arise in this poem
from a hollow carved out
of itself, the slosh of what it says
to itself, not to us.
We four in the canoe sit
in the open AH, riding low as loons.
No one knows who feels
what, or how much. The grieving
syllables lie over us, untouchable
oo-AH-hoo, yodeled
oo-AH-hoo. Oh Lord, if we knew
what we can take from each other, and what
we have to leave alone,
if we knew which maniacal dives
the universe was thinking of all along.