Ainsi, toujours poussés vers de nouveaux rivages, Dans la nuit eternelle emporté sans retour…

~from Le Lac, by Lamartine

photograph: Roger Williams Park, Providence Rhode Island

11/23/07

The inspiration: Oakland Lake on April 3, 2002

The Lake
©srk 4/02

The day before this day of bright sun,

the water was the broken glass of a Perrier bottle;

a sullen, yet rich green, refractive along the edges,

heavy from the co-mingling of clouds above.

Now it leans to blue then gray like the eyes of a

flirtatious fickle female.

On the promenade, a goose approaches,

his broad breast streaked with algae.

At first glance he is made of cracked porcelain

until he plods off to his mate

and honks in her face. 

Toward the first bend there is the lull of rushing water

over the storm drain.  The grates catch strings of green.

Two Asian parents loudly encourage their two tiny children

to reach into a plastic bag and retrieve bread crumbs; these are

ritually scattered into the lake like ashes.  White ducks glide to them.

On the branch of a bush, acting like the bridge of a nose,

there sit a pair of eyeglasses, like a disembodied limb;

startling . Removed from the contextual normality

they become a joke, yet I dare them to grab hold of the sun

with their thick lenses, focus on dry leaves, and set them aflame.

Instead, they play and mock with blinding reflective light.

Children become a photograph etched into the

backdrop of small, shiny, bright yellow, flowers, in cool green.

Now the lake belongs to Monet.

A woman in her jogging suit bends to brush her ungainly, brown dog.

At about this time, the heart is pumping,

hair is weighing heavily on the neck but pain

flees consciousness.

At the final round, near the snapping turtles on the rock,

baking like cakes in the sun,

the trucks on Northern Boulevard no longer exist. 

There are only song birds, and geese,

the conversations between water and sky,

the rhythm of  feet, and breath, and sweat,

and the vision of the lake, forever moving, forever the same.

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