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Collected Poetry

    (rd king dot net)
poetry and digital art

In California

  The Lake 


From the cabin porch it was difficult
to catch much of the smaller detail
as it was often a good distance away,
or it simply wasn't visible to someone
the detail might not concern.  Even so,
small things happened.  There were a few boats
looking keen, miniature, white—making
their various ways across the lake.  And if
the lake's blue skin wasn't their background
it was the forested peaks and saddles
that banked the far side of the water.
It was an open and pleasant view from the porch.
The sun was setting and its light came flat
against the peaks and saddles, giving them
a smoky color that was bright, and still
indifferent, as if the trees
were only a hide that contained the beast,
naked and sinewy like the coyote, with only
sagebrush and greasewood over a rocky skin.
And it was like that—a very fine
and rainless beauty—except for the far side
of the lake and the forested peaks and saddles.
Here the Great Basin had been unable to climb.
Things were different, watery.  Sailboats
kept to plainly geometric courses that crossed
and recrossed the stateline with indifference.
Or they moored in the pretty inlets and coves.
Or they would soon dock in the gay evening
at the long, gray piers of the ambient restaurants
where children played among the weathered boathouses.
Motorboats would race by, rocking the sailors
with nearly vociferous wakes.  Someone would spill
her drink or drop a lighter into the sapphire
blue water.  And she would laugh at her own clumsiness.
And her laughter would grow among the others
until the sailboat shed its sails and readied
to meet the pier.  The children, with their dogs,
would run toward the end of the pilings, laughing,
shouting.  The boys would climb atop the pilings
and make strange antics with their hands and trunks.
A last round would be poured on the drifting boat.
A quiet might overcome them—even the children
might walk back toward the bank and the dogs
would stop barking as the lighter kept to its
darkening descent.  The summit's shadow had pushed
to mid-lake and a coolness filled the umbra.
And as she stepped off the boat and buttoned
her white sweater, a wake of glassy foolishness
quickly dissipated out beyond the steady pilings.




 
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