Fox Lake

Maybe they are lovers—
                     or maybe they are carved
in rock at twilight.

But if the lake is smeared
                     gray and sensual
beyond the cattails,

here is the impulse permanently transfixed,
                     the pale, placid faces
revealing nothing,

like lost bodies floating toward you in a dream,
                     held aloft
as a statue’s fragmentation—

or as iridescent flesh transformed
                     to moonlight,
like what’s shaped

and then discarded in the stone.

After That

In the mornings now she walks
into the slash pines. She used to walk
all the way to the river, but now she stops
by the railroad tracks. Ghosts are gathered
amid the blackjack oaks, but that is not
why she won’t go farther. She used to be happy
enough to feel the ghosts trying to re-form
their bodies in the wedge-shaped leaves.
It pleased her to sense them crowding in,
as though to press close was a kind
of remembering, though she could not
herself imagine wanting to remember living
through someone else’s body. Her husband
once told her he thought often
of the skeleton inside him, picturing
the scaffolding of bones and its temporary
flesh, as though our true selves did not exist
until we were stripped finally of the mask.
In the summer of the drought she walked
with him one morning to see how the river
had dried and congealed to mud and rocks.
Even then you could tell that something was alive.
You could see where the water had carved
its name into the banks, where the exposed
roots of the trees had been washed and battered.
For a moment she had held his hand,
but all she could think about were the bones
beneath his skin, the bones beneath her skin,
and the water that had vanished without rain.