Potter's Lake

The path was concrete,

Following some old idea of a slope

Down from gravel road

Over grass—lush to the threshold

Of overgrown, or perhaps

Neglected to the edge of overmuch—

Stuffed with such a bunch of snowdrops

And the occasional half-felled elm.

But the foot-worn secret track

Paced through a colonnade of thick-

Bloomed apple trees that had thrown

Their arms (or were they legs or lips

Or wings) agape, naked, buttery

Yellow-white, droplet-moist

With dew, with careless stickiness.

As I wound down again, again

I felt (and not unpleasantly)

The morning melt into a humid hum

Of birds and insects, blunt breeze

In this tree and that, wet leaves

And buzzing things tuned to a sleepy

Ceaseless mumble by the sun.

I would sit beneath the apple blooms,

And strum the grass with my feet,

And imagine that the pale white

petal-skin boughs, by bloom weight

Spread apart, were like my secret

subject, almost flesh and blood—

Hid by incompleteness in the

Pregnant space between desire

On that naked afternoon (sweating,

Breathless as one can only be alone)

And the few real visions in the grass.

For like the ripple, up-down, in a pool—

The slapping of a rock thrown with the wind

Into a waiting pond—there were two

Trajectories, opposing eptitudes:

   The dream I kept like a well-

Worn journal in my belt, borne

From one orchard to the next

To add a word, adjust a phrase,

Yet sound as constant as a sacred text.

   The waking held its humid sticky damp

Just out of bounds—too high a branch

However high I learned to reach.

I came day after day, awake, asleep,

To hunt until I found the apple root,

While summer after summer passed

Like damp and naked skin

Beneath my hands.

EJR