For Vera It was a pretty game, played on the smooth surface of the pond, a man against a loon. Thoreau, Henry David. Walden Within each lake is a powerful being, my native friend told me. When it thunders, she said, collect the water in small pots and glasses everywhere you can, and drink. While catching storm water from a raging sky, in blue and black and white pots, I swam naked in the dark cove afraid and at home, gulping lake and sky as I swam. There is a way to open to the chill of autumn water a cold quotidian greeting of skin and shifting thermoclines as dry leaves rustle in the wind. There is a self just beyond our reach In the wild of the waters that beats as we approach. What I felt, then saw, under water was swift and black and gone. For the moment, I stopped breathing and rose. I was ready and I waited, still as morning. A small wind tugged at the dark silk of the water and in the ripple a loon emerged turned, and caught me with its pliocene red eye. Why are they so aloof, I asked my friend. Loons mate for life, she said, and raise one young each year. They have room only for this one conspicuous love and for the circling eagles that lure out their eerie lullabies. So when that red eye caught me, I gulped again storm, lake and sky a water breath for the heart of things between us, before it dove again and disappeared.
