The Men

The Men

 

Giant limbs glimpsed through steam, dangling

slab-muscled bodies so unlike your own, white  

as the birch logs they, laughing, send you outside,         

naked and important in the chill dusk, to poke

through a hole in the hut’s burning belly, beneath   

orange-gilled rocks. Pink-slatted too, those

great flanks, welted as if branded or flailed, pink       

as woodland flowers you may have glimpsed, pink

as parts of women you haven’t dreamed of yet.

Lake Nipissing, when you run with them whooping

into it, feels—just cool. Start of May. The ice ten

days out. Sauna is that strong a sorcerer. Keeping the

black lake back, then letting it creep in, and in, until,   

a long half-minute, ice-jar shock makes you splash

and holler and run howling up the snow-striped muddy

slope to dipper and steam, radiant rock cradle.

Dreams so single then: to play as a utility forward

on the Montreal Canadiens’ fourth line. To kiss

Kathy Lawrence. The trick with dreams, you sense

without thinking, is to shorten their distance from

reality, trim the fuse-chopped gap to crossable. But  

life more mountain-strange than dreams, more       

chock and various its constant drops and vistas.  

Those men, one my father, both gone now. And

yet as they live in the sweating mist, young enough

to be my sons, though I have had no children.

Dreams, shy deer, pick unseen places in the woods

to curl upon themselves and join soft dark. After      

ransack years, skirting death upon a narrow

wobbly beam, you become an ink man, poised to

spot the drop where steam and ice-water kiss.