Bitter Lake - Collaboration with Magdalena

Written for the "DUP swingers" competition.    
   
   
   
   
   
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 wet 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-in 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.