Two Lakes

A poem by Lorraine Schein

Like a cat lapping water from a glass bowl,

the sky licked its blue tongue across Williams Lake,

and it yawned and stretched its body underneath.

Our rowboat was caught by an island flotilla of water lilies                                                 

a nonviolent green fleet defending the afternoon silence

anchors unseen, shrines of flowering white crowns,

their petals like mudras, palms cupping sunlight.

You oared us out, only to be captured again.

Later, we drifted under the willows that fringed the shore--

entering their shaded canopy out of the sun

where dangling green fronds tasseled my face.

At the bungalow lake from my childhood,

beyond the garden’s Rose of Sharon lilacs

I launched from the green wooden dock,

climbed down its slippery metal ladder, lowering myself

with a thump and a squeak into a black rubber inner tube.

Dangling my legs over, feet paddling cool tranquil water

I floated to the lake’s empty blue center

between distant beaches

watching families play like tiny dolls

far off as adulthood.

I’ve gathered a bouquet of all the lakes from my memories,

scented with summer, tinted with childhood.

Somewhere they are still within me, this floating world--

where the past laps against our futures.

---

Lorraine Schein is a New York writer and poet. Her work has appeared in VICE Terraform, Strange Horizons, Scientific American, and Michigan Quarterly, and in the anthologies Wild Women and Tragedy Queens: Stories Inspired by Lana del Rey & Sylvia Plath. Her book,The Lady Anarchist Cafe, is out now from Autonomedia. Her poetry book, The Futurist’s Mistress, was published by Mayapple Press.

Image:

Lake by Vivian K.