MOUNTAIN LAKE
The next day I wake up and my wife
Is coming into the hotel room
And the first thing she tells me is that she found
A secret garden, which are her actual words,
Where she sat and absorbed as much sunlight
As she could, and then the second thing
She tells me is that she is pregnant, again,
That assuming nothing goes wrong,
Our daughter, who is on the other side
Of the country, is going to be a big sister.
I say I think I am still dreaming, probably,
But not in that cliché sense
Of life being somehow hazy or surreal,
But rather that words she is saying,
The order of them, seem more like something
Someone would say in a dream,
Especially the secret garden thing,
But minus me now saying
That I felt like I was dreaming,
Which is a near guarantee that I am awake.
As we say this, I realize I had already known
On some level but I had been trying to pretend
Like I didn’t know, partly because I didn’t want
To get my hopes up,
And partly because I knew that when I actually knew it,
When I knew it for real
It would lead me to knowing
Too many other things,
And then, when we knew it together, when we started
Saying it out loud, the meanings would snowball
Into bigger meanings, and then we would
Have to start making real decisions. First,
We decide the best thing to do with this new
Information is to go for a hike, as we had planned,
So, we drive to a trail called Mountain Lake
Which, we agreed, are two of the best
Geological features, independent of each other,
So what better place could we be without compromise.
After we decide this, all around us
Are these dizzyingly old trees,
western redcedar, Douglas fir, western hemlock,
All climbing one, two hundred feet
Into the air, and the air itself so very quiet,
Soft almost, making space for whatever
We have to say, which is a lot, so we say everything
We can, starting with the obvious stuff
Like who we think this new person might be,
What we might call them,
How tired everyone is going to be again,
Before moving onto the other stuff,
The fragility of it all, how the little patterns
We’ve managed to summon will change,
That our daughter’s world
Will simultaneously expand forever
And collapse inward, both a new galaxy
And a black hole, and that neither of us
Know how to say any of this to her.
Beside us, we can’t decide if the lake
Is green or blue, nor what determines
The greenness or blueness of any given lake.
Its chemical composition, maybe,
The algae and other organisms living in the lake,
Their eating and shitting
And synthesizing each other, maybe,
The trees blanketing the surrounding mountains,
How the light is refracting and diffusing
Among them reciprocally, maybe,
Some or none or all of these things together.
The guide on the whale-watching tour
Explained that orcas live in matriarchal
Societies, that they are among the few other
Beings on the planet who experience menopause,
Which is important because it creates space
For matriarch to teach the new mothers
And their babies how to hunt and play and be.
Explained this way, everything seems very clear,
As if we live within some order or logic that permeates
The way that life unfolds, like we are surrounded
Always by helpful explanations
Of what it is we are doing here,
If only we have the time and attention
To understand them.
When I ask my wife what kind of matriarch
She wants to be, she says a fancy one
Who surrounds herself with fancy things.
I know that this isn’t what she means,
But for a moment I feel very fancy, or that maybe
I might one day be a fancier version of myself.
The forest seems fancier, now,
And the quiet air, and the mountain, and the lake.
And I remember this pattern, too,
That a small thing can radiate outward, change
Everything around it.
My wife touches her hand to her stomach
And says that this trip was supposed to be her break
From being a parent,
And we keep climbing up along the ridge
Until somewhere below us
Is that other life we lived, so small now
That it must have always been gone.
—from Sky Mall
2024 Rattle Chapbook Prize Winner
__________
Eric Kocher: “A little over ten years ago, my friend Mark made a joke. He said that I should try to be the first person to publish a poem in Sky Mall Magazine. There was something about shopping for the most inane, kitschy stuff on the planet while flying 30,000 feet above it, just to avoid a moment of boredom, that seemed to be the antithesis of poetry. The words “Sky Mall” got stuck in my head—lodged there. This is almost always how poems happen for me. Language itself seems to be in the way just long enough to build tension before it can open into a space that pulls me forward. These poems finally arrived while I was traveling, first alone, and then the following year with my wife, as a new parent in that hazy dream of the post-pandemic. Writing them felt like going on a shopping spree, of sorts, so I tried to let myself say yes to everything.”
