As I ride the rails again, from the big city back home, I thrill to it: a glimpse
of that immense presence, the lapis strip widening as we near the shore,
at times buffed by pale light to a silver sheen, at times rocking a star-pricked path.
Today a little girl across the aisle points out the window and shouts
my lake. My lake. I follow her finger to the band of blue glittering
in the sun and smile at her fierce possessing: it is my lake, too.
When I was a child the lake lay north, flat beneath the high sweep of sky,
its stillness the only steadiness I knew amid shape-shifters, sand-face features
twisted by wind, voices like gulls' cries shrieking close and wheeling away.
In the town I live now
the lake is south.
There the horizon heaps
with dots and dashes,
the Morse code of islands.
No openness to open to.
But now on this train, and ahead to that fettered horizon, the lake waits for me.
Together we are without guile or striving, at rest. It sits shimmering
in its bounds of rock and sand; I sit beholding it, in body or mind's eye —
holding open a place within where that vast stillness lies.
About this Poem
Lori Vos read this poem at the Poetry Showcase hosted by KFPL and Helen Humphreys on 24 October 2016; you can listen to a recording of her reading on Bruce Kauffman’s Finding a Voice On CFRC 101.9 FM.
