Jana-Lee Germaine: “Pitcher Mountain Cabin, June”
PITCHER MOUNTAIN CABIN, JUNE
At the cabin, spiders
are motley, omnipresent.
I watch their fixed
purpose traverse the tablecloth,
lamplight shimmied
around modest bodies, modest
goals, grace and hemolymph
pushing legs towards corners
or cracks, anywhere a bug might go.
Exhaustive efforts to trek
little geographies,
and grief has many demands:
it needs to move, to breathe.
In the cove beside the cabin,
the yellow lily lifts her waxy head
six stiff inches above the waves;
if I swim close enough,
through thickets of slit-leaved pads,
my breath hedged by green,
I can see to the brilliant center
of her raptured face,
swim like I thought I could love
enough to make him stop.
The loon’s call echoes
the lake before dawn,
it feels like ache
and elation all at once;
I drink coffee alone
and open the curtains again.
Loons are unknowable
as any bird with an instinct
to submarine can be;
dense-boned, they dive
below the dark surface,
sometimes for minutes at one go,
trajectory, speed, sudden fish,
all I can do is wait
for the black head and white
barred neck to pop back up
like my piece of toast.
It’s a guessing game.
Waiting isn’t something I do
very well, my mind wants
momentum, to bullfrog
its way through life;
I carom from place to place,
Chipmunk Rock to Little Beach
and back again, orbiting
my grief. Rising now, electricity
in air, thousands of spiderlings
release threads and kite
to new starts, uncharted
hardwoods of home.
By the lake, wind always
soughs. Cedar waxwings
eat fir cone seeds;
with a bit of patience
I watch them land,
bodies perfectly sleek,
faces masked like cartoon
villains, head feathers
pointed back with lines
indicating speed.
Isn’t this my whole life still?
Snagged between desire
and dread of the same object,
immersed in the lake,
my once-love lost, core
of forlorn space
like a loon’s abandoned nest,
holding hope that happiness
will cork back up one day.
At the cabin I eat too much
too many times a day:
no cell service, no internet,
no place to go without a kayak
or passion to swim vast patches
of weed. This lake is man-made,
once cow pastures, the bottom
all muck, murk, decayed leaves.
It floats up in thick mats, illusion
of solid ground, but any step
will sink. As a child, the pull
of water outweighed the snakes,
the intermittent leech. Joy
was a dive into sky’s speculum,
existing in two worlds at once,
the fantastic superimposed
on the everyday. Now all I do
is float, while dock spiders
walk on water like Tolstoy’s
hermit, with perfect faith.
Jana-Lee Germaine is the recipient of the 2022 Patricia Dobler Poetry Award. She is Senior Poetry Reader for Ploughshares. Her poems have appeared or are forthcoming in Iron Horse Literary Review, New Ohio Review, Nimrod, Cimarron Review, EcoTheo Review, Tinderbox Poetry Journal, Baltimore Review, and elsewhere.