—Eyewitness accounts periodically revive
an ancient legend of a lake monster, known locally as “Champ.”
Consider the sweet sadness
that washes over the sunset-watchers
and those others made fearful
by the dark
then gives way to the rising
exhilaration of the night-watchers
across the lake, who search
the eastern sky
for the shadow of earth cast
among the first visible stars.
Perhaps the lake,
like the glacier
(its forebear and progenitor)
is a manifestation of silence
keeping its poetry
as it keeps its history
out of time
in an envelope of silence.
Far below, deep in shadow,
humans must depend upon gestures
and all are mimes—
humans, animals, fish
speaking silence to silence.
The lake, like our dreaming selves,
redolent of secrets,
wondrous and perilous.
Like the face of the moon,
which appears immense as it rises
over the rim of mountains,
the sudden reappearance
of a creature some believe exists
in the distant past
(and whose rude hovel
may be, like the moon,
many fathoms away)
seems to us monstrous,
even frightening.
Speechless
but not without song.
We imagine, in olden time,
that the going of giants
was like unto a spectacle
to make the people wonder.
A figure of wildness
we continue to long for.
Our lost libido in the person
of Pan, or Dionysus,
or the Yeti.
We understand that some
giants are only paper mâché:
some, little men on stilts
or women magnified by mirrors.
Yet there is a fable
of three undeniable shapes
in the murky depths of the lake.
If not eons old, remember
—the enormous amphibian
of Lake Champlain
is not alone.
Is death not also, sometimes,
the large shadow
of something very small.
