Summer wilderness, a blue light twinkling in trees and water, but even wilderness is deprived now. "What's that? What is that sound?" Then it came to me, this insane song, wavering music like the cry of the genie inside the lamp, it came from inside the long wilderness of my life, a loon's song, and there he was swimming on the pond, guarding his mate's nest by the shore, diving and staying under unbelievable minutes and coming up where no one was looking. My friend told how once in his boyhood he had seen a loon swimming beneath his boat, a shape dark and powerful down in that silent mysterious world, and how it had ejected a plume of white excrement curving behind. "It was beautiful," he said. The loon broke the stillness over the water again and again, broke the wilderness with his song, truly a vestige, the laugh that transcends first all mirth and then all sorrow and finally all knowledge, dying into the gentlest quavering timeless woe. It seemed the real and only sanity to me. Used with the permission of Copper Canyon Press, P.O. Box 271, Port Townsend, WA 98368-0271, www.cc.press.org | Discover our Poem Explanations and Poet Analyses!Other Poems of Interest...NOCTURNE IN A MINOR KEY by CONRAD AIKEN INDEPENDENCE DAY, 1956, A FAIRY TALE by JAMES GALVIN SAVORING THE PAST by GEORGIA DOUGLAS JOHNSON IN A SWEDISH GRAVEYARD by EMMA LAZARUS READING WHITMAN IN A TOILET STALL by TIMOTHY LIU |