MIRROR LAKES

       
          For now we see as through a glass darkly; but then face to face.


 
 
There were two of them, always there
every season, on the Mendelssohn border:
in summer, we fished for primitive life forms;
in winter, with blonde Heidi and Holly, we
skated figure eights from end to end.  A
curved ridge covered with spindly apple trees
shaped their frame, sent gradual shadows
across their length at dawn, dusk; the wind
ruffled their surface, scattering in quick squalls
miniature images of clouds, sky, trees.  Nature
formed those natural mirrors; now (after half
a century) I’m holding their image in my mind.

 
Here in the old backyard, the flowers, ferns
and groundcover are swelling from below;
bees and other buzzing bugs maintain their
hum of collective industry.  Mendelssohn
was much the same:  a hive, nest, bursting
with dreams:  with love and desire,
with respect and emulation, with pride 
and skill and ambition, with joy, hope,
laughter, boredom, gossip, pettiness,
bigotry, fear, sorrow... all somehow
interpenetrating, fused in seamless
neighborhood (of time, place, world).

 
Hidden away, somewhere in our midst,
a spiritual Sabbath, Sunday by the lake:
where the mind dove down to its muddy
origin, the murky bottom of the pallid,
chilly pond.  Here was the free soul’s
habitat:  among tadpoles, bass and
carp, lurking along the very bottom.
Out of deep dreams, unconsciousness
your motivation stems – to grow, to be...
to measure every separate deed and thing
by means of that same scrolled snail shell,
that early foreignness, that ur-estrangement

 
– so you burst from the freezing water.  Now
Mirror Lakes reflect a new reality:  the old
one, seen anew.  It is a wheel of seasoned
light, turning around a rooted tree (apple
or almond, oak, pine) whose branches
are a candelabra, spinning sweet
brevity of mortal play to mold 
for eternity: a wakeful courtyard
where servant-bees already gather
to attend their tasks - unheralded,
unproclaimed (– lovers too, intuitive,
becoming those servants thoughtlessly).

 
I’m holding an image in my mind:  Heidi
and Holly, skating across clear ice like
dancers.  As the sunflower grows
by golden degrees, so the dying world
(so teeming full) casts forth its beams
of radiant being: the profile of the ridge
that shaped those lakes remains (like the smile
of a skater, hovering in the mind long after dark).