The Busted Docks of Tonawanda Lake
It’s Halloween and in an hour or two
the dead will be up and walking in our air,
hungry for the ghost supper.
But on the lake
I’m rowing around the edge, nearly liminal,
just exactly skirting a line between
the hem of the world
and her mystery.
I glide on the water
as if my being was as intermediary,
an intercession
in a setting I’ve been sent to.
All the leaves but the Oak are down.
The cob is teaching the last cygnet how to fly.
In the distance,
the neighbor whose cabin burned rebuilds.
His hammer dents the movement we are in
as if it were signing a name in time –
something wrapped in a cartouche,
in hieroglyphs and their determinants
hung up to signify –
like the reflections of the ruined docks
breaking up in mandalas
tell me who and where we are as we pass.