In those first years I came down
often to the frog pond—once called,
before the earthen dam wore away,
the farm pond—to bathe, wading out
and standing on a rock up to my knees
in pond water, which I saucepanned over me—
and doing it quickly because of the leeches,
who need but minutes to know you're there—
or to read the mail or to scribble
or to loaf and think, sometimes
of the future, while the one deerfly
that torments everyone who walks out in Vermont
in July—smack it dead as often
as one will—orbited about my head.
Then the beavers arrived, the waters rose,
and the frog pond became the beaver pond.
A year later a sunken rowboat surfaced,
sheet metal nailed all around it
to hold the hull boards in place
while they rotted. The four
of us would oar, pole, and bail
a few feet above the underwater green bank
where a man used to sit and think
and look up and seem to see four people
up here oaring and poling and bailing
above him: the man seems happy,
the two children laugh and splash,
a slight shadow crosses the woman's face.
Then one spring the beavers disappeared—
trapped off, or else because they'd eaten all
the edible trees—and soon this pond,
like the next, and the one after that,
will flow off, leaving behind its print
in the woods, a sudden green meadow
with gleams of sky meandering through it.
The man who lies propped up
on an elbow, scribbling, will be older
and will remember the pond as it was then,
writhing with leeches and overflown
by the straight blue bodies of dragonflies,
and will think of small children
grown up and of true love broken
and will sit up abruptly and swat
the hard-biting dcerfly on his head,
crushing it into his hair, as he has done before.