Ben Groner III

Slivers of trout break the lake
open, their swift disappearance
like the silence after a question.

It’s quiet. Blessedly so. Steaming
mist skims the water’s surface,
morning light oranges the poplars

and I am thinking about my son,
his breath and his skin’s warmth.
He’s small. Vulnerably so. Acorns

become oaks, fog melts to clarity,
this wide world wakes to sounds:
blue heron yelps, the rasp of grass-

hoppers, a clique of croaking crows,
the plop-plop-plop of smallmouth
bass leaping into the unnamed, and

my child on the porch, his joyous
shrieks of aliveness approaching
something nearing an answer.

Sheepish bloat of a furniture store at night, items
faintly illumined through
the glass displaying the square footage it takes
to suggest arrangements

we can make in our pleasantly enclosed lives.
Starfish of ceiling fans, thrones
of headboards, wooden dining tables holding forth
for flocks of prim parsons chairs.

And this vehicle a vestibule for the body,
a house for aching
bones, a chamber for whatever nimble soul
may be a part of the deal.

In an airy, ancient apartment in Boston
I’ve lain with a girl I knew
I wouldn’t stay with, have seen how much
that silence can say.

The room was lovely, too. Plush king bed, gray
linen comforter, a surplus
of natural light, sensual postmodern canvases,
a sculpture of a tree in the corner.

I am still wandering streetlight-stained highways
while a furnished home beckons,
am still exhuming and examining the past,
listless, listening.