Kate Falvey holds a Ph.D. from New York University where she taught for
many years. She currently teaches at New York City College of Technology
of the City University of New York. She has published articles on women
writers, African American litertature, and fanasy and supernatural
fiction.

 

Sebago by Ice-Light

They told us the lake froze

with mid-winter regularity,

the ice thick enough to drive

a truck clear across

if you were thick enough to

want to. No one, to their knowledge,

ever tried. We were unsurprised,

each year angling for the same

droll, slow-spun reply as we

rented our September canoe.

Bobbing into our stride,

paddles swifting, we

reeled with the sweet allying

joke of it: each year

the same men, flannelled at

the same post, trolled

the same seasoned watery ghosts

and lifted certainty of ice

into the thinning autumn sun,

launching, unawares, our own

careless lolling season.

 

You snapped twigs for perpetual

kindling, stoked stones into giving

their sparks to your light-loving lens.

As the stars coved and spun,

reliably northern and dimensional,

I lay on the bedding I had fixed,

listening to the thwacks of your

lantern -lit axe and the human chuckles

of the ducks in the soft unsleeping waves.

 

Each year we said we’d winter there,

camping with unassailable gear

and fearless Yankee brio. We

would discover the truth of the freeze,

unsnarl our workaday distractions

and maze through the drifting woods,

tracing tracks of ‘coon and un-denned fox

and, braced and booted, traipse

mid-lake to the mystical pine islands

to which we had rowed recurrently

in the days when our seasons

still seemed warm enough

and certain.