What we had assumed was a lumberyard,
Certainly some sort of industrial operation
Involving forklifts, trucks, sheds, piled logs,
And myriad redolent pallets of sawed wood,
Which we knew had, before that, been old
Loading docks in the decades of silver ore,
Before the road-cut had been blasted out
Of Cape Horn, now stood stripped and bare,
Twenty acres of weedy concrete for sale,
Hedged in stern signage, chain-link fenced.
One house-sized hulk of a cinderblock shed,
Right at the shoreline, tagged in black graffiti
Of no distinction, now occupied by swallows,
Dozens and dozens of nesting swallows,
Shooting in and out of its windows and gaps,
Was the only structure left. For sale! We said
To ourselves in our foolishness, as if
We would ever be so rich or likely to buy this
If we were. On an unexpectedly sunny day
In late May, a dog barking far away, a mower
Mowing a lawn in Slocan village somewhere,
Small waves lapped up against crumbling
Arrangements of natural rock, rusted rebar,
And slab cement. Weedy species flowered
Weedily everywhere, white and yellow, blue
And bits of red. Unbearably beautiful poetry.
What is negated must have a meaning, must.
There were no boats on the water between
The far shore’s steep, provincial wilderness,
Whose Heaven and Earth delighted in trees,
And the gutted, swallow-haunted shed, not
That the lake was in any way empty of waves.
We know we have fewer and fewer decisions
And those that remain remain mostly hollow
But haunted by perfectly natural hungers.
Should we change? Go swimming? Stay?
We know, we know. We’ll spare you more
Allegory. Louise Bogan put it most crisply:
“To escape is nothing. Not to escape is
Nothing.” Twenty acres for sale at this end
Of an industry, at one end of the marvelous
Lake. Swallows flew in and out of the shed.
For a species devoted to meaning, meanings
Were never not strange. Things will cling
To their thingness, and words remain things
That mean things, waves in waves. We half
Understood that this meant it’s not meant
For us to understand what these things
Mean, but we should have gone swimming,
Just swam, and not gotten lost in the waves.
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