​POETRY   
           

" Formed in a land of small lakes,
fed by their vegetable essence,
I dreamed their closed, soupy smell,"
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                                     Photo by Weebly.com                                    

Lost Lakes *
by Dan Liberthson

​1
 
Formed in a land of small lakes,
fed by their vegetable essence,
I dreamed their closed, soupy smell,
fell into and swam in them,
twice nearly drowned in them,
saw a body drowned in one.
 
I grew to feel each person was a lake,
rising from hidden sources,
fed by streams from underwater nodes.
Each lake carried in solution all
memory and experience, which concentrated,
then precipitated out to be recognized.
 
In each mind, fish thoughts swam,
waves rippled, washed, and flowed,
currents followed one vein, then another.
The dead drifted down sheltered and embraced,
remembered and held kindly as they liquefied--
food and fuel for the still living lake.
 
The surface, like the skin of a bald head,
felt wind’s touch, plock of water drops,
hiss of slow geometric snow dissolving.
Waterspiders gliding in calm shallows
sensed the knockknockknock of wind-driven
waves sounding boats against docks.
 
Above and upon and beneath passed,
over and over again, moon, sun, cloud--
solid or reflected images, light and dark,
all traversing a world various and changing.
But the deep was worm quiet: calm soft mud
cradled whatever drifted down—everything.
 
2
 
The Pacific I’ve come to live by
is another matter—uncontained,
ruthlessly horizontal, attacking the senses.
The eyes mount in their sockets,
trying to see far enough to grasp that immensity
but it's no use. Dwarfed, not comforted,
I feel my skull’s mild liquids yanked from its earholes
by a feral wind, from clinched nostrils by fierce salt air,
reft as from a blown egg.
Beside this merciless girth and endless depth
I sense lives and deaths lost, unreachable.
Gone, the snug lakes of my youth, left behind.
 
Am I unkind to this unpacific ocean?
Do I neglect praise for dolphins, whales
and wondrous other creatures of its deep?
For the slashing colors of the setting sun?
I stand at the Western edge—ocean before me,
lakes far behind—and wait for the dark to come.

* Author's Note:  Previously published in the book Morning and Begin Again (2012) by Dan Liberthson and revised for this submission.

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​​Dan Liberthson was born in Rochester, New York and attended Northwestern University and SUNY at Buffalo (PhD, English). He has retired from a career as a medical writer, and lives in San Francisco and Cottage Grove, Oregon. He has published five books of poetry and has published individual poems in anthologies and journals, including The Haight-Ashbury Literary Journal, South Coast Poetry Journal, Elysian Fields Quarterly, Chaminade Literary Review and Triggerfish. He was Secretary of the Oregon Poetry Association (2019-2022), and took second place in the William Stafford Memorial Award Poetry Contest (2020) and the Maine Poets Society Contest (2022). He also published The Bluejay Contrivance, a spy novel, and The Golden Spider, a middle-grade fantasy novel. For more information, visit liberthson.com.

Other works in this issue:
Poetry:
​Dad Eats a Hardboiled Egg
Dad's Death

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