The Lake in Central Park

It should have a woman's name, something to tell us how the green skirt of land has bound its hips. When the day lowers its vermilion tapestry over the west ridge, the water has the sound of leaves shaken in a sack, and the child's voice that you have heard below sings of the sea. By slow movements of the earth's crust, or is it that her hip bones have been shaped by a fault of engineering? Some coquetry cycles this blue edge, a spring ready to come forth to correct love's mathematics. Saturday rises immaculately. The water's jade edge plays against corn-colored picnic baskets, rose and lemon bottles, red balloons, dancers in purple tights, a roan mare out of its field. It is not the moment to think of Bahia and the gray mother with her water explanation. Not far from here, the city, a mass of swift water in its own depression, licks its sores. Still, I would be eased by reasons. Sand dunes in drifts. Lava cuts its own bed at a mountain base. Blindness enters where the light refuses to go. In Loch Lomond, the water flowers with algae and a small life has taken the name of a star. You will hear my star-slow heart empty itself with a light-swift pitch where the water thins to a silence. And the woman who will not be named screams in the birth of her fading away.