SILVERTON RESERVOIR
Pushing away from the half submerged dock,
its wood dark and slick
Through the rainbows of oil at the packed dirt boat launch,
It was a factual October afternoon, windless
With the hills all around were filled with oaks and maples first exclaiming then confessing
their leaves.
We are molded, you and I, by how we live with our lies.
Up from the earthen dam,
Its own false horizon line-
Opposite the launch the bank was nearly vertical
Baring the marks of old chisels
And curtained with brambles
Close your eyes and you can see them, the lies,
Crisscrossing your soul like that stone embankment,
A web of gouges that are barely concealed under thorns.
The water is still,
It nearly always is,
Dark and deep
I paddle south toward the rotting tree trunk on a bank of mud.
A stream enters there, twisting through a maze,
The current snakes back in on itself
Past decaying logs and to a point where the current is stronger than the paddle
But out here, that twisted path is lost below the surface in inky blackness.
______________
Marc Janssen