Bitter Lake (Magdalena and Braggman collaboration)

   
   
   
   
   
   
Seventeenth March, 1684.    
While cresting the foothills    
we crossed the south end of a small lake    
The ice proved thin due to springs that fed in from beneath    
One man fell through with full leathers and axes    
Two others drowned in an attempt to save him    
The surviving members of the party named this cursed spot    
   
'Bitter Lake'    
   
I am silence while my surface is calm    
no wind to make waves through my tranquility    
the ghosts of those lost are sleeping    
I wear the sun like sparkling diamonds    
caught in a picture of captivating beauty    
inviting like hypnotic whispers    
Come to me and feel my embrace    
swim along my fluid caress the solution you long    
I can whet the appetite of the most innocent life    
come to me and play for a while    
   
There was a sun-bleached tire swing    
Dad told me not to go near there    
he said don’t go down alone.    
I’d seen the flashes of tadpoles    
and wanted to watch, just for a minute    
but the water tickled    
and the mud was slippery between my toes.    
I remember that I swam.    
There were clouds but no sky    
and a sunken tree, upright still in full leaf.    
I seem to remember climbing down    
into its branches.    
   
My liquid coldness is constant    
lives have dipped within my soothing ripples    
and I'm mistaken for friendliness    
the weaker becoming blind to my dangers    
that is when I take to their lungs    
drowning their feeble attempts to catch breath    
I bear down on the cries of a clutching soul    
until my blackness envelopes pulling lifelessness deeper    
Trembling currents shift my bed    
burying the debris fallen from my victims minds    
   
It was in the autumn as the sun slanted    
between the passing color and the coming snow    
when he first kissed me    
We’d borrowed his cousin’s old truck    
and rode in the long miles before dawn    
with the cedars hugging the path    
almost clothed by the closed wood    
when all at once it opened    
the shore    
blackness immense.    
   
The moon when full will raise the tide of my oceans heart    
a swelling pulse of forceful energy in flow    
every liquid quarter is drawn to her beautiful command    
and the children of many shall be born    
giving back to life that what has been taken    
She anoints me with her reflection    
equilibrium being restored by the hand of natures will    
I am eternal and part of the ever evolving future    
you will swim through my caress    
regardless of the forewarning on the approaching winds    
   
She is undoing, the liar the leveler    
the meaning of the low empty spaces between the hills    
the perfect solvent against anything we might hold elevated.    
Did the water ever have a daughter or any one precious thing taken?    
Did it ever fight to keep on the upside of the earth    
feel the struggle to stay afloat holding every selfish hope back    
from the reflected self that lives in the lower lights?    
   
If you truly could ask anything of the water, of her truth    
ask only this:    
among all people and things    
all places we survey    
of the sky and the tumults that twine beneath    
which among them belong to us and which to her?    
Clearly nothing is ours.    
What she's lost into the air weighs upon her surface    
wants to submit, struggling in isolation    
wants to belong.    
It will all be taken down    
nothing returned.