Lolling in a boat in the middle of a lake.
No wind so the water is still,
painted with light.

The falling sky
reflected back onto itself.
No wind, and the shoreline fettered with tall, dark pines.

“We are all nomads,” she tells her younger sister.
She is not recently divorced,
immersed in work,

in poetry.
“Our hearts are for wandering.”
She has forgotten the lissome figure of love,

finds she does not miss it. Finds she has outgrown it.
Instead she writes, walks through forests,
admiring

the small secrets
buried amongst the abscised leaves,
wonders if loneliness is a shade of beauty,

dresses her body in the pleasures of language:
the whining wood, the soughing wind,
her own small songs.

Here, on the lake,
she cannot hear them. Hears only
the rich timbre of stillness, its aestival hymn,

so that its melody fills her with desire.
For something denser than words.
To bathe in love.

She reaches out,
takes her sister’s hands. They are lined,
like leaves. “Sometimes I say things and I don’t know why,

as if the voice is not my own. I’ve missed you.”
A shudder of isolation
cascades through her.

Girls submerged,
pretending to drown amongst weeds
so their parents forget themselves for a moment,

come barreling down the dock, footsteps like thunder,
distant but roiling closer,
plunging under.

Come up, laughing,
Laughing like gluttonous banshees
at the ineffable terror.

She remembers the plangent rhythm of her heart,
moored to her sister’s body,
its crescendo.

“You remember that summer before the divorce?”
she asks, rowing,
moving for home.

Her sister does not recognize the old woman
rowing steadily for the shore
while dusk settles.

From their motion,
steady ripples,
wimpling the quiet,
concentric.