I have set out, grieving, for the pond, the wild pond,
The one hidden in the woods, not the one by the gazebo
In the garden with its neat wall of stacked slate
And its tame frogs sitting on them, unblinking
In the early sun, its taut flat waterlily pads
Balanced on a sheet of shining water with their stiff
Stalks rising up, their heads small trumpets, or green
Showerheads, green and living, yet controlled
As the flat planes of the fountain rising at the pond's end,
A handsome thing, bronze-green, planted upright
Like a headstone, twin fish leaping off its face
And two neat shafts of water spurting out beyond.
The whole enterprise is reassuring, like an assiduously
Tended grave, with no weeds in the crevices,
Everything precisely placed -- the frogs and lily pads
And lilies, a small brown snake languid on the surface,
Almost hidden underneath a jutting piece of slate,
Wind chimes dinging overhead. It is like a memorial
To wildness, a triumphant small example -- We can do it,
We can control it, the savageness, the death, our destiny --
Serene and limpid in the sunlight. How manifest it is.
Here, nothing is roaring in the woods, nothing creeping
Darkly out to wreck and smash and crush
And swallow us alive. All is order and propriety,
A living grave, a leaping headstone, a place to come
In the cool morning after a disaster.
But time is a stern friend, and today the wild pond
Must be found, it must be searched out. The woods
Must be entered and the narrow trail trodden,
With its reaching brambles and its clutching vines,
The rank breath of the night monster rising from the slime
At the creek's edge. It is late now. It has taken me
All day to get here. The air is damp and heavy, and after all,
It is not much of a pond, just a flat brown spread of water
In some soggy woods, shallow enough to wade across,
With a heft of boulders at one end where the creek
Clatters into it, and at the other, a flat black marsh,
And then a drop, and then the creek goes on.
Low bamboo grasses tangle at its edge, and the bank
Slopes gently at the marshy end, sharply farther back,
Stringy grasses growing in the boulders' cracks.
The katydids are making their continuous complaint,
Like metal being crushed, and high up, a pigeon mourning,
The same five doleful notes repeated and repeated
As if its heart will break. Somewhere back behind,
A dog lifts up its voice and howls, and stops, and howls again,
A low groaning reaching upward to a high thin wail,
Like a woman keening. The mosquitoes are not out yet,
Although they will be soon, night visitants,
Reminders that the day has gone and cannot be called back.
The fish are small here, but they are many, invisible
Where the setting sun catches the flat surface,
Making out of it a bloodied brown mirror
Where the shoulders of leaning trees hold up the sky.
If you look closely, you can make out dozens
Of small mud-colored shapes, none longer than my hand,
Suspended in the branches as if they have been strung there,
Living ornaments, or trapped, tangled in the leaves,
And have gone into a coma, like the boy,
The young man on the edge of manhood,
Lying in the hospital, trapped in plaster casts and bandages,
And the wire holding his jaw onto his head,
And the purple stitches holding on his ear,
Tangled in tubes and probes and catheters
And lines into machines that say with peeping sounds
He is living at the moment, barely,
Making no promises about this evening or tonight.
If you climb up on the boulders and come into the shade,
Looking at the surface from another angle,
Everything is different. The bleeding sky and straining trees
Are way down at the bottom and the fish, suddenly,
Are striped and barred and colored, pale blue fins and tails,
A golden flush along translucent sides, each fish
With a black dot on its dorsal fin, and another
Just behind the gills, as if it has been pierced
One side to the other with a tiny silver rod,
And a small round onyx fixed onto each end,
Pierced, like rebellious adolescents,
Rushing to gape at this monster peering back at them,
Not understanding it might scoop them up
And carry them away, like the young man
Who fell in love with the pretty girl who scooped him up
And carried him away, rushing and rushing
Down the valley with her black hair streaming
And laughter streaming from her throat, her tires
Screaming on the curves, to be spun about
And broken and tossed into the woods beside still water
Where fish went skittering about, shining in the sun,
The beautiful flower of his brain opening.
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