Iridescent Lake by Katie Ford

for S & E

After many years, it occurred to me to write of my friends,
of their long marriage,

of the woman who woke one morning
to find an elk had laid down on their porch for the night
to sleep like some heft of creation
ambled out from prehistoric woods,

of how no man or woman had the language evolved enough
to articulate the elk’s calligraphic intricacy of heart, nor
what wish might arrive for them, late in age, marriage-old
under blankets worn by the dawn lighting
her blond-grey hair into an almost-likeness of sunrise
on Iridescent Lake,

of some form of yourself you love best because it survived pain that came
like a cornered dog baring its teeth under the same porch
of our elk in this story, the same porch

of the created world resting awhile
on the stoop of this marriage.

Inside, it is Sun Valley.
Her husband spoons sticky rice
into the middle of the bowl,
displacing soup up the sides
with the equivalency pleasure teaches us is pleasure,

just as their bodies pressed the lake
edged in thimbleberry up and up
until it was thinly watered
by his body and hers, the body she kissed
and now kisses, the body she fucked and now fucks,
the body she swims to here in the marriage
of a hundred lakes—Tahoe, Rainier, Iridescent—
and on the Colorado Plateau rivered
as if only for them,

he who labored
to reconvene some semblance of justice for schoolchildren
so shat upon by this country of fat wolves,
she who stripped back violent thought
written by the white minds of men
for a decade, alone at the library carrel
where her heart scholared, too—.

          __________So now we understand the tenderness
with which he spoons rice into the center of her bowl,
why she would say to anything that pains him,
you are thin, you are dirty, then tend it until it is removed
by its own thickened, cleaner ability to live well
and leave her husband alone,

though it’s true they’ve hurt each other and November hurt them both,
they said so, separately, to me: November.

But the elk, who had every choice in the forest,
walked out of thin Klimt birch and wild scotchbroom
to sleep at the door
where these two slept.

Opening the door to feel for the weather but to find this elk,
who wouldn’t open
all of the way
to that which halts us
to begin, once again, again.

If this were a symbol, I wouldn’t brave it as an elk.
It was exactly, and only, an elk.

Katie Ford is the author of Deposition, Colosseum, and Blood Lyrics, which was a finalist for the LA Times Book Prize and the Rilke Prize. Colosseum was named among the “Best Books of 2008” by Publishers Weekly and the Virginia Quarterly Review and led to a Lannan Literary Fellowship and the Larry Levis Prize. The New Yorker, The Norton Introduction to Literature, Poetry Magazine, The Paris Review, and The American Poetry Review have published her poems. She served as a 2016 judge for the National Book Award in Poetry. Her next book, If You Have To Go, will be published by Graywolf Press in August, 2018. She is Professor of Creative Writing and Director of the MFA Program at the University of California, Riverside.