Will Brewbaker

Not an Ocean (Apophasis)

You might be forgiven for forgetting
it’s only a lake, what with the gulls
and the salt in the wind, and the wind,
too, no longer the almost-obligatory
reshuffling of air that it was just a few
blocks ago, a few turns inland, where you
passed the Fifth Third Bank on Fullerton,
the one across the street from the freshly
painted CVS, and barely noticed the wind’s
shy shiftings—
no, out here, at the concrete
edge of lake and land, the wind’s a kind
of statement, though of what you can’t say;
or, rather, won’t say, since theophany
seems an ugly word and God uglier still
and, besides, both overstate the thing . . .

And what was it you were chasing
with your useless nomenclature—?
Oh, yes, there it is again, in your face
so clearly you understand, briefly,
the hard consonants of gale and bluster,
though you can’t say why and, for once,
don’t care to . . .
For who doesn’t tire
of reason every so often? Call it romance
if you have to name it: this impulse
not to conjure a cause for all you see:
the glassy peaks of the downtown
mountains rising above the ocean
that isn’t an ocean; the steady infantry
of dogwalkers, some heading toward
the city, others away from it;—and, too,
the stone-carved bison, the one you passed
on your way to the lake, who stood
his daily guard outside the museum
dedicated to who knows what; the bison
who, despite the sculptor’s best designs,
neither knelt nor looked you in the eye
but rather stood with such assuredness
of form that you didn’t know whether
to come up close and touch his hooves
or back slowly away, the whole time
apologizing for something you didn’t do
but would’ve done, had you been there,
though you don’t even know if this one’s
a member of the already-gone or just
the soon-to-be-gone (not that it matters,
since the going’s what’s certain) . . .

So what did you do? What you always do:
nothing at all: you just kept walking
to the water, which, if the maps are right,
is enclosed by land on every side; you kept
walking to the water, thinking the whole time
of how rough the hooves would’ve felt
on your smooth palms, and how other
from both yourself and the representation
the thing itself must have, years ago, been.