A Lake Scene

May Swenson

MAY SWENSON

         A LAKE SCENE

So innocent this scene, I feel I see it
 with a deer's eye,
uncovering a first secret from this shore.
 I think of the smoothest thing:
the inside of a young thigh,
 or the line of a torso when, prone,
the pectoral sheathe crosses the armpit
 to the outflung arm:
at the juncture of lake and hills, that zone
  (the lowest hill in weavings
of fainter others overlaid):
 a pelvis in shadow.

The hazel waves slip toward me,
 the far arcade
honed by the sunset; nothing tears
 the transparent skin that water
and sky and, between them,
 the undulant horizon wears.
No contest here, no roughness,
 no threat,
the wind's lick mild as the lake's;
 the rock I lean on, moss-round
as that silhouette
 in the thwart of the opposite shore;
spruce and fir snug-wool its folds.

 My eye goes there, to the source
of a first secret. I would be inheritor
 of the lamb's way and the deer's,
my thrust take from the ground
 I tread or lie on. In thighs of trees,
in recumbent stones, in the loins
 of beasts, is found
that line my own nakedness carried.
 Here, in an Eden of the mind,
I would remain among my kind,
 to lake and hill, to tree and beast married.