Many Waters

Well

At Grandpa's it was sealed,
covered, to us only a cement slab
beside the garage--supper table
for cats, platform for oatmeal
no sooner slopped from Grandpa's
spatula than surrounded
by half-wild satin feet.

The boards turned soft
over ours at home,
crumbling, pink with decay,
green with moss, black--
black beneath the cracks.
Brick-lined darkness took
a long time to swallow a pebble.
"Do not stand on the well."

We found another--my sister and I
 in the bowl of that dip between trees
 and unmown rise where we could pretend
an absence of modern life, seeing only
trunks and branches, grass and sky--
a half-world secret, earth giving way
about the lip. Our careful bend at the waist,
craning of the neck, revealed
a filmed surface and the rotting fur
of a drowned rabbit.

We bounded away, clapping and calling,
"Elly, here Elly!" lest our beagle
follow her appetites beyond return.

                    * * *
Fountain

Toes curl over
manufactured stones
in manufactured stream bed
from fountain to lake.
Orange algae makes
even this slight descent
interestingly hazardous.
Each slippery burnt-umber
hump becomes some kind
of dotted rest as life piles,
white as ice, behind the ankles
and careens, gloriously,
into the still green lake.

Clipping our hair in her tiny salon,
neighborhood beautician recounts
how Grandpa cocked his head
one day to the tune of her
coffee table fountain, declaring:
"I think you have a broken pipe."
His utilitarian take diverts her.
Later, in his kitchen,
we tell him: "She thought
your mistake was really funny."
A huge grin and silent laugh
betray his double joke.

After the heat and hurry
and spending of Navy Pier,
the fountain draws a simpler circle:
the toddler in his diaper slapping
shining pavement, the businessman
watching (expression open as the child's)
the silver bubbles top each jet's
arch, wobble against the blue,
burst in heavy sparkles
coming down.

                    * * *
Lake

Great Lakes are all I know of oceans . . .
a week on Superior, afternoons at Michigan
until the sun turns the water light blue-silver in its setting.
I've felt the respiration of the waves, bobbing
doubled up, like a cork; and heard it, lulled half-asleep on sand.
Sometimes the water heaves, like anger, excitement,
some fierce joy--leaves bite-marks on the beach,
miniature cliffs of sand. The flag warns of danger.
News reports tell of people lost. They seem, always,
to be young.

This is far from our minds, my sister and me,
perched on little islands of rock, a hop out from shore.
Today, the water won't leap even the few inches
to our skin; we dangle our feet to touch it.
Little eels rest beside our rocks. The contours of
snouts and eyes remind us of comical dogs.
Their amber-brown sides appear soft as velvet.