Journey to the Lake By: Will Cordeiro Past backwood rills and backroad rut, down home in Tennessee, she strays a gravel path inside the shrubby gloom. Each coonskin cap, each cornpone legend of some greater Boone, is mixing up her head—another line she didn’t know she crossed, a further tale, the Mason-Dixon or the lazy river where Huck and Jim escaped their mind’s own border. A prisoner of silhouettes, dogwood and sassafras that seem strung up with spiderwebs; along the underpass, graffiti thick as kudzu on these trunks, blood brothered names that would be praised as famous men, a land like grease that leaves a stain no future can erase—when she imagines how the South might once again be burning, bourn away with clouds of ash and acid rain, she thinks about her own past flooding through the afternoon. She slips through branching scraps where cottonmouths sleep coiled in the sun. What gossip tips the leaves? She overhears a song that’s hidden in the jostled wind as if some riddle shuffled off clear skin. Through canopy like frames of old stained-glass, she views a lake—but stepping closer, sees her eyes have painted on the empty air. A day-moon faint at the meridian signifies that history leaves by gradients. Iotas frolic in a gust of pollen. Nature duplicates fogged desires outward to echo in the vaults of blind cathedrals. All atomists construct machinery by which they are deceived. Lank, tangled vines have crushed gray shale. A dampness leaks around her ankles; inklings of a centipede brush by. Each quick step snaps a twig. The grizzled understory rots something human while roots entangle down the musty dankness.
8
Mosquitos sizzle through the humid air. Trees charter her a passage through green flames. Maybe this is just to compensate for a broken idyll in a broken world— sometimes the pieces fit together, though, the gears are tractable, the senses mesh, and jarred and spraddled as we are within our thoughts, yet something tangible begins to turn the whole kaleidoscope. The view shifts parallel to things-as-they-exist. The lake she has encountered at the end of this stray path is real. Between the hollers, the daylight fades. Sun stuns the water solid black then bright, which shatters every idol. She walks out further as soft edges lick the slick shore back. A glut of sludge and smut, as if someone had drowned right here before. Foul skein of algal froth, logs waterlogged, a seep of bubbles circled in a chain releasing troubled breaths throughout the deep. When nothing’s certain down its drift-wise edge, slow currents recreate their channels’ sifting. Debris gets dandled—rives and torques—among whatever forces drive the flow she’s been abandoned to. Enraptured by small urges, box turtles lurk below thick lily pads; sunfish curve up and nibble on her toes. A darning needle scatters its scintilla. She floats now on her back, a paradox between the elements. All tension holds her while clouds exfoliate the day’s blue void. As if embellished on the quiet surface, desire catches at fate’s fitful glimmers bent at sundown on the pond’s reflection. She stares across its glossy mirror, lost and relishing this rarity: a moment when her thoughts can wander free, suspended, before the fish’s flash and trash of flesh would school her in their tricks of shade.