by Lorrie and Barry Goldensohn
It is easy to lose myself-
music can claim me entirely
when I drop the bar of forced
inattention that scatters me
all around the room
or by surprise as when
I walk offthe track into woods,
but it is not music but loss
itself that claims me back
from what seems too busy, false,
clamoring Me! me! me!
It is hard to attend
to the lives
singing around me: frogs,
flies, leaves, the birds,
bark of bear or owl
rolling across the lake
and the trill and howl of the loon.
Always a noise in my head-
the din of my body moving
as my shoulders roar in my ears
and my laboring, reeling breath
deafens me and encloses
my mind in a sensible cloud
of everything it knows
except for the voice that calls:
"Stop, stop,
stop
this busy chatter and roar
and sit and be still and hear."
The lake is cold in
its season.
A mist squats and is still
on the water, recently
ice,
and the rising
sun makes it glow,
I a fire in a field of snow,
before it breathes
it in
and leaves the mirror clear.
My daughter's afraid I will fall
out of my light canoe
in this icy water and die.
She knows there is something to fear:
even in midsummer heat the thrill of danger, swimming
on the warm surface above
the scrotum- and nipple-tightening
cold ofthis bottomless lake,
and the danger of the claim
its beauty makes on me.
Garish and magnanimous,
the sun descended in fire
in the whole western sky,
and the long sloping shoulders
of Monadnock and her clouds
diminished with distance
in my rearview mirror
until I saw entire
the profile of the mountain,
her black animal spine
against the lurid sky.
I needed the full view
and climbed out of the car
to see it face to face;
the distance vanished inside me-
without moving at all
I was suddenly crouched on her flank
and buried my face in the leafmold,
sweet-smelling,
delicate, moist,
my cheek brushed by ferns,
and the outspread mass of the mountain
embraced me as I shivered
in the cold, early spring,
cliffs, streams, falls,
boulders, trees, snow.
These are not dry leaves
crunching
under my sandals, but tiny snails
so fragile even to brush them kills.
We laugh, stopped-with no place to set down
our feet in this flood of delicate souls.
I can't find the road
that curves into the woods
then through a dappled clearing,
the way to the red house
surrounded by four trees
between two ponds,
one large, one small,
and the music of their short
waterfalls and graceful
innerlight-large
windows, rooms, and broad,
high hall. Now,
walking in to town
to buy the Times, my long
early-morning shadow
walking before me and sleep
still glazing my eyes, I struggle
to separate the loss
of a real home from a dream
home and I can barely push
my shoulders through
the battering wall of air-
this too is dream.
Years ago, a long search
through my house
for Les fleurs du mal, every room, the attic;
then later in a village where I knew
I could be myself without restraint because
everyone knew everyone and everyone saw
all the enterings, withdrawals, visits by day or night,
I looked in the library and bookstore in vain
for an Italian dictionary for alove poem-
some naked thing veiled in alien sounds
I needed to translate from Montale and could not.
This happened often, and I found myself
leaning against the wall of a house that shrank
to my size, then smaller, then like me a tiny ant
that walked the full length and back of every needle
of a spruce I studied closely for many days.
Who we were last spring,
whose thigh
and whose mouth was opening and hands flowed
we could not separate. You, opening your eyes
slowly, taking hours, brown, with clear lines,
before I tumbled into them-I seem
to remember, though I cannot tell you
whether early or late.
It is winter now. Waking
in our deep
bed under heavy blankets, the room crowded
with ghosts, whispering their terrible message
that no one we love will ever be forgotten,
sealing us in archaic dreams of love-
Mother, Carlos, Deborah, Alice, Dan.
Curled tight around my
wife
from the pulse in my face across
the stubble field of my torso,
my happy prick
a sleep,
down to my cool feet,
everything touching at once
the skin and the heft behind it
and the shifting passage of breath.
How confusing, the boundaries of soul!
In this confusion, delight.
by
Lorrie Goldensohn
From the windows above
East Long Pond
I can look down into the transparent water
through to his arms breaststroking,
his legs frogkicking. Through the silk
of pond water I can scout
the whole conscientious medley-stroke, crawl-
as the pale flesh of his bent knees,
lifting elbows and turning shoulders
flash through a grating
of green and brown light,
taking up color from the green and brown bottom.
Everywhere clear water bears him up....
As if I could see straight
through
to the end of his life-
the swimming, shifting field of his flesh
bringing my eyes
to the constant whorl and spin of it,
and the water that glazes him
no bar to my sight:
a man moving through water
and detachable fromit.
As if in the meat, bone,
and blood
of his body on land
he were not the zen abbot's
famous junction point: a machine
for the transmission of food,
over a lifetime converting twenty tons
of vegetable and mineral mass to shit.
If in the medium of pond
water
I see the body's
finish,
and if on land
nothing but the opacity of stages
with neither nobility nor vital conclusion-
well then . . .
This morning
near Walter Bothfeld's, our little car
appeared to leave the ground,
crested, then slowed at the hilltop farm,
cows and machinery erratically
crossing the road from fteld to barn and shed,
and we let them pass, paused
in the rising of those
deep animal airs, up there
where the stench and the view are strongest.
Off on the downslope
the other
bony-rumped, great-bellied Holsteins bunched,
their noses pressed to the cropped green,
just below the peaks of the Woodbury mountains
layering and lacing the broad canvas
of our descent.
Maybe I should have stayed
here by the window.
Seeing the friendly water-
pine, beech, and maple
lying upside-own in the flat glass, their leaves
reflecting the current, a swimmer
amusing himself-
my hand at the glass,
his hand in the water, here
and there, depth and shore, water and air-
everything simply itself.
East Long Pond, a man
turning, translucent in pond water.
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THE
LAKE HOUSE
by LorrieGoldensohn
The sun hangs, a lob
of cold fire
burning a hole in a lower branch
of the big hemlock out front.
In this glacial bowl we seem
to stiffen until midday
when the sun swings high enough
to melt the snow-to thin
the wide ribs of whiteness
still left on the dock,
the white pudding over rises,
and in the cold spots, the inches of it
spread neatly under pines.
Inside, the solar cells
hold at eighty percent.
We've had a scare with the pump,
but now the tap throbs and swallows,
spitting a dear stream into the sink.
We're grateful. From the window I see
the water musing flatly, still able
to ripple under a light wind, expecting
any day now the long stall of the ice.
Even if the sky stoops
to jam its late-season white light
into every crevice surrounding
the stripped trunks,
it's no use: at every dropping turn
the throat ofthe road
waits to fill with the stopless snow....
It's time to pack and get out of here.
In some placeless, slippery
choke-hold of the blankets
I rolled around last night, and then
left you and the warmth of the bed
to see the dock's hands at five,
a sheared moon showing the lumped hills,
the bulk of the lake
flowing across the blackened window.
How secret it all seemed,
the woodstove breathing quietly,
and downstairs at least the kitchen warm:
me, a prowling animal inside another animal.
Large, airy,
and amazingly filled with darkness,
my house's knowledge of itself
is not continuous with me. Another life
belongs to its boards:
inside the wooden skin, the lung
of the walls expanding and contracting-
even the sturdy pipes, knowing
their crust to be penetrable-and yet
the whole to be standing,
it's a good bet, when I and mine
complete our contract with the ground.
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