"Loons Mating" by David Wagoner

Their necks and their dark heads lifted into a dawn

Blurred smooth by mist, the loons

Beside each other are swimming slowly

In charmed circles, their bodies stretched under water

Through ripples quivering and sweeping apart

The gray sky now held close by the lake's mercurial threshold

Whose face and underface they share

In wheeling and diving tandem, rising together

To swell their breasts like swans, to go breasting forward

With beaks turned down and in, near shore,

Out of sight behind a windbreak of birch and alder,

And now the haunted uprisen wailing call,

And again, and now the beautiful sane laughter.

"Loons Mating" by David Wagoner from Traveling Light: Collected and New Poems.

© University of Illinois Press.

Trout Lake Report: Whither the Drakes?

On a warm early evening you kick out into the channel...

...and begin the long voyage down the main Drake shoreline. The last time you were at the lake you found few Drakes on the other side. You want to look here. Is the hatch over?

You have on a big, bright muddler variation. You put it into every fishy opening along the bank that you can find, like a key in a lock.

Sometimes the lock opens to reveal a shining treasure.

A Drake flies by. Just one. It's several minutes before you see another. A Yellow warbler's darting flights reveal where several are popping from the water in a slow rhythm. You tie on the Drake fly, and trout dart at it too, and are caught.

You reach the far end and turn and begin to work your way back.

Fish are working, but it seems that they're taking something other than Drakes now. Your fly is ignored.

You stick with it awhile, but then return to the bright muddler variation. That gets some attention.

The Drake hatch is not over, but you are forced to conclude that you have seen the beginning of the end.

The pages turn, and a new chapter begins. Time to tie up some Damsels, and a fresh batch of muddlers for some new shorelines.

"Night" by Louise Bogan

Bioluminescence, Vaadhoo Island, The Maldives

The cold remote islands

And the blue estuaries

Where what breathes, breathes

The restless wind of the inlets,

And what drinks, drinks

The incoming tide;

Where shell and weed

Wait upon the salt wash of the sea,

And the clear nights of stars

Swing their lights westward

To set behind the land;

Where the pulse clinging to the rocks

Renews itself forever;

Where, again on cloudless nights,

The water reflects

The firmament's partial setting;

--O remember

In your narrowing dark hours

That more things move

Than blood in the heart.

"Night" by Louise Bogan from The Blue Estuaries.

© Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1968.

Trout Lake Report: Summer Solstice Countdown

The longest evening of the year....