Lake Freeze
The lake in December
Does not want to freeze.
It wants to stay outside
And play with the sky.
It wants to perfect
Its portraiture
Of the naked woods,
The lonesome cottages,
Of mighty Orion,
It wants to go on
Chastely bathing the moon.
But the hard currency
Of its turtles
Is buried in the mud,
Its frogs are locked
In cold storage,
Its kingfisher dethroned
And forced into exile;
The last of its ducks
Have been detonated.
The lake imbibes a grim freezing rain.
It swallows a nightlong snowfall.
And still it wakes supple,
Rising in points,
Breaking in foam at the shore.
But it no longer feels
The sun on its skin
And its largemouth bass
Have lowered like anchors.
All day it is dead to the traveling
Menagerie of the clouds.
Its helpless shivering
Shatters the sunset.
At night it dreams
The blue heron has returned,
But its pike surrender
At the armory,
And it wakes in frost smoke,
Perfectly numb and still,
Belted by a thin crust of ice.
It flails dumbly,
Crushing the ice—
It must stay awake!
It must keep moving!
In subzero gales,
Blue-black and white-capped,
The lake is the Midas of icicles.
Its waves are crystallizing.
One muskrat attends the last
Double-setting of the sun.
By moonlight the reeds
Are overtaken and imprisoned:
The lake is breathing
Through a final portal
With a final trembling star;
Then it wakes without waking,
Without having slept:
It is paved in glass
By winter’s developers.
It presses to the pane.
The pane is snowed under.
The lake is the Fortunato of the sky.
*
The lake sobs.
The lake is its own sepulcher.
It is only the dread
Of knowing only itself.
But its terror attenuates
As the lake night-adapts
To the consolations
Of its slow inner life.
Its wandering
Galaxy of sunfish.
Its nursery of tadpoles.
The patient rounds
Of its muskrat
And biding minnows.
Its sleepwalking hellbender.
And it begins to remember—
Everything:
The mayflies'
Greeting goodbye,
The intricate rings
Of a warm rain,
The comic harping
Of the green frog,
The narcissism
Of the evening swallows,
The artful dodge
Of the water strider:
In cold-blooded bliss,
Without hope
And without despair,
The lake commences
Its autobiography.
