. . . off the Gunflint Trail
A few ripples on the lake
folding themselves over like anonymous notes.
An idle day. Time slows here, as they say
it does in space; the minutes elongated,
lying in a long row in the sun,
stretching out, softening.
You ate your sandwich on the rocks
while your canoe waited like a dog on a leash:
it has all the fidelity (you were thinking),
all the eagerness of a spaniel.
It was company.
After dozens of failures
you finally remembered the camera.
You mounted it on a tripod of boulders
and composed the scene around
a missing man: you’d have ten seconds
to scramble into place
and turn back
before the shutter took its tiny bite.
This was exposure number twenty-three
on the mystery roll installed seasons ago
at Christmas (always, if nothing else, Christmas).
The camera saw what you saw
but it remembered.
Yet it felt nothing.
Only you knew the truth: not what you’ve done
but what you’ve felt
and wanted. Not what you’ve saved, either,
through years of supposed self-denial,
but all you’ve spent, and where,
such as here, a day alone on the water
revising your epitaph.
Was it vanity to arrange
the wilderness as your backdrop,
to motion the tamarack
a little to the left?
The woods answer only to the sun and wind.
Cedars lined the far shore with their roots
well below waterline, cedars with their burden
of near invincibility.
The color wouldn’t be right. It never is.
One day you’d hold the photo and try to explain
how green it was that day,
how the quiet seemed to build to a crescendo,
the inertia to a climax.
How you wondered at your heart
beating past such a moment.
You adjusted the camera, worried about the battery:
old and bad, no doubt.
Perhaps it wouldn’t matter
because the available light . . .
and here you paused, looking up . . .
Not a cloud. How often does this happen?