Arts

Self-Portrait in a Placid Beaver Pond

As reflection would have it, the air still,
the pond surface at certain angles like
woodlands opposite. Or at other angles
mirroring sky, and close-on to the angler,
like a woodlands studio reflection caught
of him or her as a portrait-taker might
be headless beneath their black cloth,
the angler at a loss, seeing only through
his or her camera lens, if at all, he or
she being one and the same against
a background of woodlands but not seen
by the camera, now focused far out onto
the grassy pond, more a meadow with
tall vegetation, broad-leaved, almost
up to your waist and a pond no longer,
but stream channel through tall grasses,
the water surface more of the sky, just
now a near-cloudless Adirondack blue.
It is the kind of sky you hope to wake to
back in your cabin, remembering when
all the children were young and could
be rambunctious all day, whether in
or out of the cabin—rain the disrupter
of mature human calm going back, all
the way back, to cave dwellers, no doubt,
despite how caves tend to be few here
and small, this being a function of our
bedrock’s granitic, not erosive, nature,
unlike limestone, say, and made more
vulnerable now by our acidic rains
as erosive agent belched into the skies,
then distributed by winds even far onto
those few now innocent of acidification.
Flat-out, the pond surface’s reflections
distort nothing, short of winds’ rippling
them, or insects’ slight surface stirrings
often stopped dead by a trout’s harvesting
perpetrators of such distortions from below,
one supposes like a vacuum cleaner, if we
could see the actual distorting of air, not
just its effects on whatever nearby may
succumb to its force, difficult to visualize
as the result of the breathing strength
implicit in those trout often caught here,
ten-inchers being trophies in this pond.

Read More Poems From the New York Almanack HERE.