The Wake

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?"