And limoncello out of lemonade...

This is another poem from my writer's block period. It came from my journal scribbling. I looked closely, and then made a list of things I saw in the pond in my own back yard. The title is literally what the speaker is doing in the poem..

I'll Tell You What I See:

a pond lying flat, algae

furring rocks, its dark breast corsaged

with water hyacinth and a piece of floating bark

I picked up at the river, an island with grass

growing on its back, like the Navajo turtle

who swam down and returned to the surface

with enough earth on her shell to make a world.

The koi have not been seen for a week. They brood

in shadows, slice between iris stalks and jointed stems

of horsetail. I wonder how coming winter looks to them

through the pond's surface, where alder leaves

float––curled, yellow, but nothing like the sun.

I wonder if they feel cold, if it's driven them deep

into shadowed corners, and whether the food

I scatter, which looks like pearls to me, takes on

an ominous aspect––if it looks to them

like floating lightless spheres have fallen

suddenly into what used to be their sky?

–Megan Bohigian, published in Sightlines by Tourane Poetry Press, 2013.