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Spectators
With her checkerboard back
and zebra collar, the loon
never watches us watching
her. Instead, white belly submerged,
she settles in low in the ripples,
considers diving for what we cannot
see or feel swishing about webbed toes.
Or is it the castaway slivers of dreams—
our own half-remembered stirrings—
that propel her down through the murky
underneath with that spear-shaped bill,
searching for what fills and satisfies
(smelt, minnows, perch, small pebbles
from the depths of lake that help churn digestion,
crunch crayfish and crabs, swallow leeches),
or our late-life visions that startle her into rising,
awkward body scuttling atop the wet
surface of a muted Maine dawn.
Across the corrugated waves, we sit
on the curved shore, where, occasionally,
she’ll struggle to walk, tempted away
from water by mating or an unprotected nest.
But now, having retrieved from the below
what we cannot, she lifts into soft-blue,
a plump seagull not even tipping
her short wings to signal departure,
not even registering the two of us
at first light, waving our human hellos.
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