in human time

not dimensional and not 
in my mind spacious 

for so long the lake was 
a blank with only a book 
full of floating Mormons to fill it

meaning it was a lacuna
news to me its population 
of flies and microfauna

although a man I knew once
had a boat     was a brine shrimp 
fisherman who fancied himself 
a captain     fancied himself       rough 
and ready and more than that 
raised Mormon but an emphatic renouncer

A good captain always shares
the catch with his crew  
he told me     as if 
naming a foundational ethic 
of the lake

the lake was fuller then I think
perhaps stretching our
capacity for understanding

for a century or more enough 
of us took water as a right
refusing to know that water 
taken as a right 
eventually punishes  

in the last three years we’ve gone twice
and each time it felt more 
like a dream    pink and foamy 
at the recessive shore 

from which my husband picked up
armfuls of foam     shore-bloom   
knee-high     barely wet but surely salty

*

years before 
along the eastern shore 
of another inland sea   
the Salton its diffuse horizons 
miraging as we stopped 
to look across

the towns we drove through
someone’s idea of future resorts 
ending in hard-pan failure

and still someone     some ones
live there     somewhere besides
in the houses taken down
to the studs

abandon hope all ye who enter
scrawled in spray paint
by a literalist on one wall
buried alive on another

at the south end 
a wild bird refuge    
at dusk numberless water birds 
aloft     the sun burning
to its conclusion 

at that shore we saw 
dead birds too      and dead fish
despite its refuge 
the sea shrinking and toxic

I don’t want to say harbinger

*

when we went to the salt lake
the first time     of course 
we went to see the jetty
as we drove    the signs 
both indicated and confused
it glittered    all of it
a dead long-necked bird
curved into a half-heart 
diamantine in salt

is this a story that will help?

that first time was three weeks 
before my father died
the second three months
after my sister

the spiral like a tattoo
a spiral like time unfurling
not geologic time because it is
human scale    made by a man
with earth movers and ideas
human scale and therefore
containing the seed of loss

longer than a single life though

intended to be that   intended to 
undo very slowly    be undone
only by erosion    by waves and time
itself   

and in that like the lake
also made by the earth moving 

by ancient waters’ changes

the next time I am there 
I want to be there 
when it rains to watch snow 
melt into its salt     I want to mark

no further anniversaries
I want to witness water

having its own way 

Courtesy of Lisa Bickmore.