Here in Maine, in the very heart of winter, there are times when you need to close your eyes and conjure the smooth, sun-struck slats of a dock jutting over a lake.
Even much-maligned heat waves don’t seem so bad from the vantage point of winter. After all, on a lake in the month of July, the escape is just inches away in the form of deep and cool water.
The dock days of summer inspired a poem once. I dug it out for a reread yesterday. It’s one of those poems written last for a manuscript (which would become Lost Sherpa of Happiness). One that never had a chance to play the markets and look for a home in some poetry journal.
I often like these orphans best. Never accepted anywhere, but never rejected, either. They just “are,” which is the perfect metaphor for whiling away hours on a dock, like you did when you were a kid and time held nothing against you.
Rereading poems from different seasons sometimes brings you back, and they’re much less complicated than a time machine, where hitting the wrong button could land you in the Battle of Hastings or something. If you’re cold, why not join me for a sec? And if you’re in the Southern hemisphere, perhaps you can relate:
From a Dock on a Maine Lake
Ken Craft
Lying here, side of my head resting
on the crook of right arm and gazing
from the grotto of my right eye,
I hear the water and see the creased
dam of my left elbow, the occasional bird
flying through its wild blond grasslands.
The left eye, though. It peers over
the tanned levee, sees the high gold-shot
lake—so high it threatens
to flood and marl the east shore
where clear sky, punctured by treeline,
seeps anemic blue to airy bone.
Shifting to my back I get the sky’s
gas-flame blue scribed by pine and maple
treetops, the firmament a forgotten
language from first-person point of boy.
And my God, the wind! Needles and leaves
nodding like anxious ponies,
wagging like old ladies’ heads
at green gossip. Trees exhaling a ropey
poem of clouds. White thoughts, broken
words, startled birds put to flight. They flock,
elongate, twist and split open like smoky time
seeking its own shore to roost.