Another hottest summer ever.
Storms with the violence of a broken atom.
Storms that drove the boats in
and smashed them in their slips. Power out for days,
so we lived by the sky, like any animal.
Runoff turned the bay red
as from some ancient slaughter —
the smelt runs, perhaps, every spring of your youth
when fish crowded the river mouths
so thickly you could reach down with only your hands
and take all you wanted
and people did. In the evening
we knelt on the boulders by the big lake
and washed our forearms
in the surges that rose against the stone,
and the water we loved was cold enough to kill us.
His ribs were thick as barrel staves,
his heart full of chambers such as waves
carve out of granite,
smooth caverns accessible only by boat.
His toes were like mushrooms,
misshapen by the sealed can of a boot.
They had the look of fish bait
as indeed they were
when as a child he sat on the weathered dock,
the soft gray boards, his feet
dangling in the lake, and sunfish
nibbled his toes. Sunnies.
What was death, but sunlight on the water?
Now he set herring nets on summer mornings
while the village slept. His boat was unnamed,
a workboat among the pleasure craft
in the marina. Nothing polished,
no illusions, no vanity.
He left the harbor on an open palm
held out to the lake and sky.
He was an offering.
Good days he filled the boat with thrashing fish
drowning in oxygen. It was the same fish
over and over, like page after page
to the illiterate.
This man with a kind disposition
sold his catch, and thus he lived.
“North,” he said, and the word itself
spoke, offering hardship and darkness and solitude,
and he trembled like a compass needle.
Sometimes he caught a fish that had cancer.
A south wind carried the stench of the paper mill.
South. A single city sixty miles across.
Thousands of cars on the freeway,
all sizes and sorts, like fish
forced together by low water
or by a net. The air he was obliged to breathe,
air that had passed through
smokestacks and motors and ducts and countless
living lungs before his and after,
air that had a history,
that had come to the city years ago
blown in from the alfalfa fields
to enter a copse of mirrored towers
now seen, now lost in the sky,
rising and falling through the hours
without passion or purpose
but with exhilarating ease.
Flocks of ravens gathered in the dirty park,
shining like the jewelry of the Aztecs
polished by slaves.
Heat waves rose from the grid, a conflagration
that seared the silver bellies of the jets.
There were highways among the clouds
or else the sky was but another blue sea
and planes were passenger ships,
as birds were fish,
as wind was a current.
Why lament? So goes the wind. South.
Here is the puncture
where poison entered the body.
He took up the rope
and drew the boat toward him like a pony.
It woke as he stepped into it
and settled obediently under his weight.
Then the canter of a small vessel in the swells,
the bow high, power
from the churning hindquarters.
He went out against the will of the lake.
The water red as the sunrise:
he was crossing the sky.
Later it would be rough,
perhaps dangerous,
the warning repeated every few seconds
until it goes unheeded.
Where does a wave begin?
in the quick pulse of a mother’s blood
pouring into the bay of the womb.
Impossible to say whether the water
speaks from within or without.
Ashore again, he felt the earth
rock on its fulcrum; standing on shore
he felt land-sick, drained, short of breath.
A cabin so small it is like a woodpecker hole
smelling of fresh pine pitch.
Like a new-made pauper’s coffin.
Calm today. One feels the depth of the lake,
the weight of an iron anchor
falling through the fathoms.
Here or there a surface disturbance,
a boat wake, a few gulls bickering over fish offal,
then a random gust from the north.
The lake wrinkles the way a horse,
dozing in the shade, jerks its skin
where a fly lands.
Waves come to shore backward, blindly,
like a horse backing into wagon traces
with a sack over its head.
If a horse knew its strength
it could never be tamed.
The north pole. Instruments alone confirm it.
And what if the instruments disagree?
Can there be such an absolute arrival?
Or does realization come later,
far too late for the champagne?
And what of ambition?
Surely it precedes a man by months, years,
and has already published its memoirs.
Here one senses the attention
of every compass in the world
pointing like a crowd of fingers
toward a tightrope stretched between
clouds. A lone figure looks everywhere
but down. So much light,
light to spare, light to spread on the ice like salt.
The pole afloat; we are neither first
nor last, though perhaps nearer the last.
We need no instruments.
The equatorial vertigo subsides;
the heat of exertion dissipates.
We have no fear of falling.
We can never be lost.