Indian Pond

All through a bitter April,
spring has refused our invitation.
Still, the inner seasons turn,
and, when the ice breaks
and the blue water furs white
over the rocks in small streams,
the silence that had blanketed itself
in the crippled apple tree
pppppppppppppppppppppppppp walks away.

I hear that silence in the water
when I stand on the pond's edge,
and watch my father brace himself
in the stocks of his fish house
out on the ice, a silence
that seems a loon weariness,
a burden of lost bear,
lately moaning coyotes cutting
through the sheep's straw fur,
ppppppppppppppppppppppppppppp for the kill.

Over the ridge now, I see morning
rise in white smoke over white houses,
and know the cows have awakened
to their milky certainties.
I awaken to the depth charge of my own
stove's fire, having dreamed all night
of the smoky weeds lying deep in the pond
and the past certainties of mid-May,
when a blaze of dandelions lit my path
pppppppppppppppppppppppppppppppp to the water.

Spring's reasons come hard through the trunk of winter.
A father like mine can spend too long in a mind's ditch,
filled with paper potatoes, curdled cabbage, squash
and zucchini blooming in floods;
ppppppppppppppp can huddle too long
with death's gazette, chimney fires, a son's leaving,
a barn gone down under heavy snow.
I would awaken the water's flow in winter,
and have him uncoil in his boat,
with the peppery summer wind tugging at his laziness.
That would be more than the sap of April's promise,
less than April's refusal.

Mid-May.
I grow impatient with the lazy sting of blackflies,
with the patient way my neighbors snuffle
in their gardens and gauze them for the cold nights,
with the loggers' bourbon legends, and with the clouds
down from Canada spread-eagled over treetops.
"Something the heart here misses."
But wise old Indian Pond erupts on the left hand of spring.
In the sand at its feet,
someone, borrowing the incense and fire of another life,
has cut a crescent moon, to mark the place
where tethered April broke
ppppppppppppppp and disappeared.


From BOLEROS (Princeton Univ. Press, 1991)