Low moon on Lake Monona

I Dip My Foot

Low moon on Lake Monona over thick dews

Held down in a blue jean gray sky by orange hues

I sit at day’s end, accomplished in sweat, on a cool

Metallic bench at the lapping shore

Tonight is not the other nights, when the water’s edge

Hollered fear in its mercury sheen.

This is the warming reflection from the oven-lit sky

Taunting me to jump in, to shed my shorts in the public grass

To wade amongst the drowned stones and push—

Push into the great lit middle

Could I go under, scouring the underneaths with slow strokes,

Banking sandy, rippled loams and outstretched elodia?

I might lurk the doleful bottoms with spine of catfish,

Fingering my depths with smooth familiarity,

Breathing in lungfuls of nutrient algae, plummeting down

Into unlit trenches at the pressured floor.

Tonight I could lose myself, listening to the lup-lup-lup

Of Monona, its welcoming pool coaxing my firm foot

By its sexy, hydraulic curves.

And so, sandals sitting obediently under vacant bench,

As if to tempt a drowning, I dip my foot,

Hanging all the while to an outleaning alder.

Down where water licks air, foot sinks to mid-calf,

Warm air and water alike.  Death is just like life, but

Fears arise on the wobbly stone:  Spider’s thread across cheek

Craggy drop-off.  Ants on trunk.  Current.  Darkness.

Layers of impenetrable depths.

On the bench again, I feel scorn set in

Why have I been born into a suit of human flesh?

Why not the fearless moss or painstaking moon?

Why am I the prisoner at nature’s edge and not the wave

Moving into oblivion, rolling lazily through night,

Peering into sky and soul beneath, laughing

Lustily with the breeze, rocks?