In the northwoods, the serene pulse of the lake greets
buds and pollen falling under pines while bees hum
praise from sunrise until dusk in this place of trees,
a century and a half old in coniferous years: annular
rings of spruce and cedar, the scotch and pitch, the fir,
blue junipers shadowed by hemlock and tamarack.
A long lake gleams through the keen boughs of trees
on the shore. A late sun bleeds like a fish in the forest.
Our dwellings are named for springs in the scriptures:
the seventy palm-date trees and twelve springs of Elim,
the fountain of a goat-kid called Engedi, the healing pool
of Bethesda, and waters from the psalms, living and still.
What do mosses say of their miniature hills in midsummer
and frigid, sporeless winters, those icy foliations of silence
in these years of rage and reckoning? Why do we whipsaw
the world with wars and epidemics when a mountain ash
and tall maple tell us we are nothing but souls adrift,
our salvation quickened like quartz clockwork wound
by God’s hand, or surely changed by the dropping glow
of a cold front moving over the lake? The evening wind
whistles like a wood flute in my left ear. I ask, what is a sign,
and if so, is God chortling in a flock of loons under the moon
pulling the human tides of moods? This pulse of the lake
floods lightly by comparison, than the dark lake rock huddled
together under forest turf, and the fractured, mineral base
under a tangled fringe of liverwort rosettes and mosses,
or those fat spots of honey tucked in a faraway, desert cleft
by bees who hum their witness: God is here, this is good.
