Not There
As we drive past Benedict Pond, you make me stop the car.
Listen, you say, a loon. But it is only the day
lifting out of its surfaces — yellow lilies
floating on the water, shade occupying the trees,
the kind of clarity that comes when there is no more
to say and we invent other sounds.
What do we need to hear beyond our stories,
to make this afternoon singular among the ones that go
so un-oracled they become the same
repeated notes? It is always dangerous to move
deeper into that forest of listening, always easy
to get lost in what is not there. The loon’s song
sounds like laughter when it means alarm,
but we imagine happiness — a mistake we can’t help stopping for.
