And Screw the Mountain, He Said, I Wants a Lake Shore
– by Autumn Noelle Hall
so this is me
laying you out, old friend
like an almost smile
on that Lake Shore
eyes squinchy-closed
guitar hands folded
so’s you looks
like you’s listening
to glistening riffs of jazz
just-sailing off
a river of moonlit keys
like your belly
be full of the best
momo soup
any Nepalese
joint could ever fix
like you’s about to bust out
in daffodils
every bulb a golden ode
to spring-song spun soft
from a trumpet
with a crumpled bell
like you just swallowed one
sumac seed
and sees you’s soon
gonna be that tree
like a leaf spinning sugar
into touchable fire
lights herself up with
every little lick
she’s ever learned
from zephyr
and snowmelt
and sun
like a screech owl settled in
an old sumac tree
improvising
a new river of jazz
gots no time for
little troubles
scurrying like gerbils
under gin-doubled stars
like you know that
lakes and life both
be round
and any way
you set off from here
you ends up here
like you know
all you know
about love
~for Malcolm, whom I’m glad to have met on the shores of Round Lake.
Bio: From 2016-2018, Autumn Noelle Hall served as the the inaugural Tanka Prose Editor for Ribbons , the Tanka Society of America’s print journal. For more than a decade, her Asian Short Form poetry has appeared internationally in print journals including Atlas Poetica, Ephemerae, Eucalypt, and Red Lights, online journals like Contemporary Haibun Online, Haibun Today, O: Journal of Arts & Letters and TinyWords, and in numerous anthologies; her photo haiga have been included in journals such as Haigaonline, Simply Haiku and The Zen Place, and won Honorable Mention in the annual Jane Reichhold Memorial Haiga Competition. Like her mountain abode in Colorado, her poetry is naturally home to husband, daughters, wildflowers and waterfalls, bears and mountain lions and their tracks through the snow. But her writing is also a form of reckoning and confrontation—a way to truly see and make sense of self, society and the world. Like her photography, Hall’s poetry is a lens through which she seeks to collaborate with readers, allowing them a momentary glimpse of life through her eyes.
Editor’s Note: I’m the shameless but grateful recipient of this poem, so I should perhaps explain that it glancingly refers to a number of my own poems, among them “Round Lake,” which I’ll append here:
Round Lake
– by Malcolm McCollum
One year of my life, I fished Round Lake.
No fish lived in it, but it was still alive.
No one else fished it; it was reputed dead.
No one had faith but me,
And I had none either. I knew
I’d never feel a tug all year.
Each time I’d rent the only rowboat left
from the dying man in the dying shack,
and row out slowly to where fish would be,
perch, maybe, along the reed bed edges
where the water looked like amber tea,
and my daredevil swiveled
like a victor’s flag through liberated crowds
of waving, slime-feathered bottom weeds,
and came up empty every time.
There were no fish in that lake.
I’d sit on the rowboat’s aft seat,
listen to cicadas grinding in the pines,
watch the midges dance to their tune,
and be alone and glad of it.
One time, rowing in, I heard a flop
only a fish could make resound
and Round Lake turned topaz in the sunset,
and that’s all I know about love.
(Previously published in Almagre, 2002 and The Poet Said What?, 2009)
