Summer wilderness, a blue light twinkling in trees and water, but even wilderness is deprived now. "What's that? What is that sound?" Then it came to me, this insane song, wavering music like the cry of the genie inside the lamp, it came from inside the long wilderness of my life, a loon's song, and there he was swimming on the pond, guarding his mate's nest by the shore, diving and staying under unbelievable minutes and coming up where no one was looking. My friend told how once in his boyhood he had seen a loon swimming beneath his boat, a shape dark and powerful down in that silent mysterious world, and how it had ejected a plume of white excrement curving behind. "It was beautiful," he said. The loon broke the stillness over the water again and again, broke the wilderness with his song, truly a vestige, the laugh that transcends first all mirth and then all sorrow and finally all knowledge, dying into the gentlest quavering timeless woe. It seemed the real and only sanity to me. Used with the permission of Copper Canyon Press, P.O. Box 271, Port Townsend, WA 98368-0271, www.cc.press.org | Discover our Poem Explanations and Poet Analyses!Other Poems of Interest...SONNET: 13. OUT OF CATALLUS by GAIUS VALERIUS CATULLUS THE LATTICE AT SUNRISE by CHARLES TENNYSON TURNER THE SORROW OF LOVE (1) by WILLIAM BUTLER YEATS AUTUMN AND SPRING by JULIA COOLEY ALTROCCHI MORNING MIST by MABEL WARREN ARNOLD AT HAWTHORNE'S GRAVE by CHARLOTTE FISKE BATES THE BOAST OF THE TIDES by WILLIAM ROSE BENET THE DEPARTURE OF PIERROTT by WILLIAM STANLEY BRAITHWAITE CROMWELL'S SOLILOQUY OVER THE DEAD BODY OF CHARLES by EDWARD GEORGE EARLE LYTTON BULWER-LYTTON |