Barbara Crooker
Looking for Loons
This poem doesn't want to be written,
stalled like a stationary front, going nowhere,
elusive as a loon that's diving in dark water
and surfacing--where? We both guess
where it will rise, but we're never right.
At night, its call ripples in my sleep,
a trail of liquid O's dancing in the wake.
Like paddling our canoe in Penobscott Bay,
where it's lunacy to take a canoe out in the open water
at the mercy of the following tides,
drifting without destination; you, sitting stern,
wearing my favorite shirt the color of falling leaves,
your hand firm on the paddle
just as last night, in our nylon tent,
they knew how to stroke my body into love;
how I look at your face, which is on fire,
and know that this exact feeling will not come again,
will fade the way a campfire eventually goes out,
sparks flying up to the dark pines.
But still we take our green canoe camping,
going nowhere, poking around the edges of a lake,
still looking for loons, who surface when we least expect them,
their round vowels rising in the pine dark night.
I turn from the bow, we kiss, and my knees turn to water.
The way this poem, in spite of itself, burns to be written,
surfaces like the ripples our paddles make as they dip in the water,
spreading in circles and growing, a quiver of notes
in the throat of the pines.
Copyright (C) Barbara Crooker, 2006. All rights reserved.
Previously appeared in print in West Branch