I wake early & in all that black     leave home
moisture in the air made visible by clouds     blue coolness
rogue waves borrowing form from the troposphere
harlequin in flight     floating world of coots canvasbacks
& hooded mergansers     white moon ringed with black
we peddle the rocky berm counting ducks

census of species in a long series of signs

                        daughter’s stars thinly inked
she sings while she draws     cattail    tree swallow    
song sparrow’s burnt streaks a sunburst from beak to chest
like the cumulus along the lake’s perimeter
drifting & flattening into nothing into
a smooth white haze


            ~


Pied-billed grebes swim around semi-submerged barrels
signpost grackle shimmers     purple & black
lake as chemical reservoir     water over shoal over sandbar over
the tern’s silver wing-tips     I have said nothing of the muskrats
swimming the lagoon    their rat-tails surfacing
as they sink between impoundments

every formal experiment is a move away

narrative in new rock     no jaws no teeth
only expanded temporalities     sea lampreys in Lake Ontario
for a century before descending into Erie    
little more than     a leathery cartilaginous tube & digestive track
confused seas divided into units   we run to the shore    
use my boot as touch-stone


            ~


Thinking across scales     issues of agency taken up
in an age of limits & dull absence    the lakes tip
one into another     long billed black-bellied dunlins
amble mudflat for mollusks     we collect the names
like specimens     hoarding them while we can    
tributary leavetakers & new arrivals braided into

an endless dark corridor

                        into pearl-rush then button harvest for
mother-of-pearl     a heart a foot & two hinged shells
empty niche     for zebra & quagga to occupy
the shallows & the depths     swamp-rose mallow
spiny softshell turtle     in a time-scale relevant     we watch
a yellow-headed blackbird out of range     sing


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