A Lake Scene

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.