The Lake Poem by Sheena Blackhall

Lady, your winters of snowflakes are chilling.
Rain-seconds tick on your face; too late!
You are making the many none
Dissembler, dissolver, leveller.
Moon is a reckless bather,
Dipping his toe on your elegant Japanese plate–
A buttercup-olive Mandarin,
Glazed on blue-boned china.

That salt-shake-sprinkle of stars,
Those ripe-red poppy suns,
Smalled, in your shrinking retina
You drank them down and in, all gone, all gone.
The incautious river,
A slant-eyed junkman from Old Siam,
Lowers his sails in the iceberg of your calm–
Lake, how like a woman you are!
How still, how slow, how graspless as a shadow,
Sheer as kimono silk.
A swanlit Ophelia pillow,
Your midnight milk
Could fit me, snug as a moleskin pelt
Of velvety, velvety brown...
Rockabye water of treacherous eiderdown.

Black lotus, your honey is venomous.
Oh most exquisite foe,
How full I divine each gleam,
Knowing each window-veil
Clasps in its rotten seam
Lost stars, a silt of sequins.
Lady, lady, the busy, unstiching pike
Will pick and pick them clean.