Poetry

The lower lake

i
The summer is past, the schools are full.
The sky is a cut peach.
Through the humidity
the fat man rows, heaped like spoil in his row-boat,
struggling the water and air. You
are swimming lengths through the cold
drawn
under-water of the reservoir,
the tannin silk, the rot.
Lifeguards, college girls browned and red-wrapped
gather on the raked sand
to jostle their sharp perfections.

ii
The sun sets itself down like a sack among the hills,
a charcoal stump, a bright trickle
for the gullies. The brook
carries on, assuming the lake
portion by portion. Cavalcade of shadows. You
have laced yourself
tightly together, buried the ends, promised yourself again
to the difficulty,
as among the darkened lily stems
perch are busy
piecing together the over-perch, the one thought worth thinking
for perch.

iii
Oblivion of crickets
over the black baskets of trees, the watchtower air, the settled miles.
There are trains
moving, heavy bells among the boughs. There are roots
and lures, nests
cracking
in the willows. You
are warm in the dark with yourself—
the granite ciphers, the quarries of sleep. I too
and for twenty years have drifted these woods. I am more than nothing to them,
a try of their pollen,
a summer stem of their perfection.

iv
Early light let from the pines and night
put away in its pots. Catbirds tinker in the filaments
of lilac. Slight ruin
beneath the trellised grapes—the scabrous table, the still tea.
The vines
have climbed to the mock-orange, are reaching
for the dogwood
and are themselves a trellis for honeysuckle.
Mothers linger at the street corner, the lit grapes
are crowded with darkness and you
are a brook
of blood, that difficult water.

David Troupes