Tonight I
Tucked down to the lake
For a cool swim
In the very last dregs of day.
Slipping down to the shore
A fine sheen of shifting indigo and silver is
The only way to tell where land ends and water begins.
Blind, groping my way,
Trusting the softness of the lake
I am cradled by a horizon of silhouettes – fir, cedar, distant hill
A blanket of spreading velvet under the banquet that is the sky.
Moon half a peach with puffs of cloud encircling
and Mars, dull iron, throbbing beneath.
To the west the clouds wheel and stack
in an amphitheatre of indigo
The day’s last chugging puffs
lit
against the amber embers of sun.
O Sun!
You burned so bright – we all did – today, in the blazing eye of summer!
Me, skin aglow like a persimmon
Hiss like a sauna stone as the lake takes me in.
My body dissolves, subsumed by soft, silken Cusheon
All my urges and frantic makings
Extinguished.
Flecks of stars flash across the sky
Raised not by heat, but by the cool of night…
Goosebumps.
As I swim,
The bands of reflected moonlight break apart in my hands,
carving ripples like the inky grooves
On a vinyl record.
Teeming moths: so many moths
You can’t see them until you nearly swallow them
thousands of flying things, frolicking furiously between lake and sky
In a great mess of swirling twisting bodies all feasting
In a wild moonlit revel that must come humming to life
Every night – when
Our motors, our labours, our breakneck attention
Sputters to a slow.
An interloper on these devotions,
I come to shore, wrap up and go
To bed…
Echoes of microcosmic vespers
dancing
In my head.