I met a man at a wake
who knows
the highest point in
the Great Lakes Basin
is a bluff where water
drops nine hundred feet
to the untrespassed
river bottom,
where the remains of the
last wolverine were found
and where wolves crossed.
Others eat shrimp,
drink wine and toast the deceased
and don’t know they
don’t know
I’m pinned in place
like a butterfly in a classroom
while he takes me into
the forest to listen for loons.
I met this man who goes
to Isle Royale for the silence
not for the call of the
wolf
because in spite of
what some say,
they might not be there
anymore.
A man who pays
attention to words
like a craftsman to the
tile cutter slicing through water.
When I talk I feel his
eyes
listening, listening.
And I want to go on and
on about something
so he'll keep looking, and looking.
Was it the sound of
water falling
or the warble of a water
bird that infected
his story of kayaking
on Lake Superior in a storm?
The cry of the loon is
interrupted
by the clap of the
skeet outside the yacht club.
They punctuate our
conversation like a grammarian.
Shooters send their
targets flying across the water
with no mind to the
wake inside. Life goes on.
You only ever hit what you
aim at.
The first time you hear
a loon, you know what it is,
like the first time you
meet someone
who could draw a map on
a napkin you would follow,
but only the loon in lonely decibel can
take you there.
Linked also to
The Garden's Tuesday Platform
as we remember Mary Oliver, Pulitzer Prize winning poet who recently died. From my favorite poem of hers The Summer Day: "Tell me, what is it you plan to do with your one wild and precious life?"
