At the Access

Progressive, The, May, 1999 by Everett Hoagland

with loving memory of my parents, Everett and Estelle Hoagland

   The view is always renewed. Today
   as I descended the weathered steps of the lake
   access, I paused to look at shadowed Champlain
   and remembered

   "Points Of Interest" in the staid, old Essex Inn's
   new brochure: the bay is four hundred feet deep
   far out, off nearby Town Park Beach. At the bottom
   I wondered

   who walked in, fell in, jumped in, went
   under to lake bed long ago. Who drowned
   among The Native Peoples, early French,
   the sport fishermen, canoeing tourists,
   heedless, headstrong children? Whose

   were the accidental deaths, recurrent,
   despairing suicides? Something unseen
   splashed. The whispering water's low waves, ripples,
   lapped the pebbled shore distorting my reflection
   as I stood there bare foot, ankle deep, on the edge

   I sank
   into deep, dark, cold silence; a sullen
   city frame of reference made the mirroring
   water more than forty stories deep ...

   ... A black loon surfaced,
   a small shiny fish sideways
   in its beak; shook its feathers dry;
   shook and headfirst swallowed its stilled, quick-silver
   prey.

   The wind picked up; the hardwoods' new leaves showed
   their silvered undersides. The pines swished hushes
   overhead. A brown duck's alarming squawk
   and sudden flight across my bay

   of years to boyhood, across the centuries'
   settlements, aboriginal millennia, the glacial lake's ice
   ages and thaws brought me to see me
   and the water for what we were, what we are, what we will,
   can be, again, all that. I gazed at, contemplated
   Champlain's tiered mountain backdrop.

   Squatted, searched,
   picked up a thin, flat stone; watched it skip
   the water over and over and over again after
   my windup and curled-finger pitch, skills--like
   bike balance, fishing, swimming
   --learned for life.

   I stared across the great lake and heard the silent
   visual fugue of Vermont's undulant Green
   Mountains; pushed off
   taking tackle box and other gear; rowed
   my little childhood boat
   toward them across the suddenly still waters
   and hummed a hymn.

Everett Hoagland's new book, "... Here ... New and Selected Poems, 1969-199," is forthcoming from Pennywhistle Press. He teaches at the University of Massachusetts-Dartmouth in North Dartmouth, Massachusetts.