JP Grasser

Brief Thoughts beside an Alpine Lagoon

It’s a wonder we keep wanting
anything at all. That desire outlasts
the body which contains it
and grows into a single object,
or noise. Take, for example, the marbled wake
of a loon, or the cooing sound
at the heart of Goose. How within
its flurry and silliness beats the golden ache
of childhood, or how last night’s blizzard
obliterated the landscape, softened
the awning of junipers
to a mere idea, but behind the nebulous
tapestry of cumulus and nimbus, there was the Moon,
and inside that, the hollow cry of want.
Or the foolish thought that words
only elegize what they signify and pain
is desire fleeing the soul. It took my father
an hour, one summer, to disassemble
my bedroom door as I hid
in the closet, and when the poplar
jamb finally gave, neither of us
remembered why he wanted
in to begin with. In the panting dark,
I stroked my moocow’s fur and each
iota of terror slipped away into
the panels of pineapple light crawling
along the carpet—joy, too,
I suppose. The light this morning demanded
squinting, and so I tried to record the tone
of your dreaming hum, the wild
satisfaction and dazzling impatience
tucked inside each sigh, and the antique smell
of the black walnuts, roasting for pancakes.
Your shoulders rose and fell and rose.
To think of the monumental balloons
you filled with those lungs, how many endless days
you spent with your face pressed into a pillow
after the cancer took him, and before those, honking
pure majesty through that blue plastic kazoo.