Lake Effect

She said, “The lake is like an open book,

day like the steady gaze of a reader.”

I said, “The day is a book we open between us,

the lake a sentence we read together

over and over, our voices

ghost, bread, and horizon.”

She said, “A spoken song in several voices

moving in and out of many rooms.”

I said, “The mind like a lake,

and your voice a figure of the foam.”

She said, “The book a voice, its pages

burning in rooms birds foretell every evening.”

I said, “The lake keeps changing its mind,

undecided between

the word for the end of August

and the color just before grapes ripen.”

She said, “The book summons the reader

to read the laws of water, wind, fire, dust,

and the destiny of voices.”

I said, “Voices in a room by the lake,

the lake itself an older voice, unutterable

law and companion

to a brother and sister telling

each other the missing parts

of each other’s stories.”

She said, “The lake is a book. Open the book

and the book says:

The world is full of people, but seldom

is a person to be found.

The world is full of light, yet who

has seen such a thing?

The world is all dark, yet a hand finds its way

to other hands, a mouth its way to another mouth.”

I said, “The lake keeps changing its mind,

a book turning,

now the shadows of clouds on the pages,

now the shadows of pages on the waves.”

She said, “Shadows of birds

and leaves blown in a wind

have fallen on the book

birds and clouds and leaves in silent tumult

among the pages.

Day is a get, an illegible stone,

a garden, a woman with a book open in her lap.

And the book says: Silver,

the women sing of their bodies and the men.

Darker, the men sing of their ancestors and the women.

Darkest is the children’s ambition

to sing every circle wider.

Dying, each sings at the edge of what he knows.

Inside us is the unknown, that chasm

singing makes visible by overleaping.”

I said, “The lake is an unblinking glare,

a single page turning in day’s fire.”

She said, “The page is shadowed by a reader’s face.”

I said, “The book turns in the clear fire

of the readers’ gaze.

The voices in the book arrive like waves.”

She said, “The waves arrive like the unfolding

sum of our days speaking.”

I said, “The pages are traveling,

the book is without horizon,

and over the form-flecked body of fire,

hands keep changing places with wings.

Therefore, a voice was first, the world comes after,

and the book comes last.

Open the book and the book says:

Ash and dew sing the founding notes

of world, book, time, and body.

The page remains the place where we can hear them.”

She said, “Voices lie toppled, confused

on the open pages, When the voices move,

we hear who is who.

A wind blows, the book is open

to a voice at evening

asking, Are we many or one?

What do the past lives of the color blue have to do

with the fate of words and the future of wishing?”

I said, “The lake’s blue is the very memory of green.

The waves whiten as evening grows darker.”

She said, “Time is a roasted egg, a sewing basket.

Time is the names of ships, a history of kite making.

Birds, turning in a flock, are a fleeting shape

of Time’s deafening voice.”

I said, “The shadows of birds on a page

almost tell a story.”

She said, “My gaze clouds the page of your face.”

I said, “Even in this boundless space,

if both of us turned our faces

toward each other at the same time

our mouths would be separated by an interval

a moth could not fly through without touching

both of what we said.”

She said, “The lake, the first and last page of the day,

overwhelms every word written there.”

I said, “So who was running down the steps

in front of the museum in the rain?

Who woke up sitting in the window of a moving train?"