Group Self-Portrait at the Dying Lake



When the last drop of the Onondag’wa

utters its final secret, you’ll be nothing more

than a glint in the mare-foal's eye

as she staggers first time to her feet.

Reduced to light, you won’t mourn

the page gone missing in

a cloister catacomb—nothing like the forgotten

grocery list turning up in your dotage at the back

of a sock drawer, its tame litany coruscated

and awake as the Epistles translated by

Copernicus before he lost his head to the sun.

Great teacher, great trickster hides the truth

at lake bottom till we're done arranging ourselves

for the portrait, grandmothers tucked front row,

rib to rib, grieving the rationed breath

of descendants unborn. They have witnessed

the tarn-basin rise, peeled back in smears of

dirty wind. What civilized being would not

turn away from her mother's naked underside?

There is no hospice plan for the dying lake.

No epidural for the fishes' stunned vista

beneath a raft of disinterested spores

drinking up the light. Though cataracts

deploy like pupa veins in our eyes, we will

recognize each other when no recognition

of the body remains.

Glint Journal, Winter 2019