Accounting Poem by Robert Wrigley

Burgdorf Hot Springs, Perseids, August, 1982


There was no moon that night, and the moose
might have thought that we, naked and heeled together
on our innertubes, were a pair of gigantic lily pads.

Then he came through the left-open gate
and clomped along the wooden walkway toward us.
His antlers shed shadows halfway across the pool.

When he leaped into the five-foot middle depths,
he cast a wave that nearly capsized us
but paid us no mind at all, thrashing out

and scampering in the cold toward our towels.
Instead, he plunged his head again and again
into the hot water and flung from his horns

enormous starlit hafts of droplets shimmering,
while we shivered in our towels but could not not
watch him there, now at the farthest, deepest end,

the water barely reaching his withers. He blew
three blasts of breath from his flues and at last clambered out
at the meadow end, stepping over a yard-high fence

as though it were a city curb. He stood
in the starlight then, steam rising from him
like a cape of diaphanous tulle, before he walked

into the meadow itself, among the grazing elk
we'd been listening to for an hour,
and we dropped our towels and made our way

back to the innertubes and stayed several hours more,
making love once, counting seventy-three meteors,
nine bull elk bugles, six cow barks, one moose.