I just heard a loon-call on a TV ad and my body gave itself a quite voluntary shudder, as in the night in East Africa I heard the immense barking cough of a lion, so foreign and indifferent. But the lion drifts away and the loon stays close, calling, as she did in my childhood, in the cold rain a song that tells the world of men to keep its distance. It isn't the signal of another life or the reminder of anything except her call: still, at this quiet point past midnight the rain is the same rain that fell so long ago, and the loon says I'm seven years old again. @3At the far ends of the lake where no one lives or visits -- there are no roads to get there; you take the watercourse way, the quiet drip and drizzle of oars, slight squeak of oarlock, the bare feet can feel the cold water move beneath the old wood boat.@1 At one end the lordly great blue herons nest at the top of the white pine; at the other end the loons, just after daylight in cream-colored mist, drifting with wails that begin as querulous, rising then into the spheres in volume, with lost or doomed angels imprisoned within their breasts. |