It’s hard to imagine that I can call
up a scene from 40 years ago,
to the same forest,
the same lady’s slippers,
the highbush blueberries,
the old aluminum boat flipped
upside down,
the rotting boat slip.
Somehow, the loons,
paddling their webbed feet
around in that mirror-clear water,
fuzzy babies trailing behind them,
dragonflies flitting overhead.
Impossible to believe that
if I go back there, if I could
go back to that place,
the loons won’t remember me.
How many generations
of babies survived the onslaught
of people wealthy enough
to build that road
into deep woods, across the lake
where nobody ever imagined
there could even be a road.
But money talks,
at least in that town,
and longtime nesting areas
in marshes were filled,
and in they came,
building houses into the face
of the mountain,
bringing noisy motorboats,
aluminum docks,
brightly colored blowup toys
that ended up somewhere
on the water.
But we had our own impact.
A modest house, sure.
A yard, barn. Horse arena.
The garden with willows
woven into an archway.
There was love. Care.
Now, likely shambles.
It is easy now, all these years later,
to forget, day to day,
as if I must have misremembered
that time and place
which I alone forfeited
to my future.
And now, some forty years later,
I keep discovering that reality
has declined
to sign a contract with me.