for Nate and Hanna

The water here is a quarter salt, and small things
turn it pink when light is out, when the sky
is out with hourless blue, the blue in the water,
turning pink to purple, and the shore with white foam,
tumbles. It is no wonder but wonder that the artist
chose this place to build the inscrutable, quarter
mile of jetty spiraling into salt water, shaping
it, receiving its shape, dirt, basalt, salt grass,
pickleweed. Something happens when you step inside it.
The water is the shape you make—it fills bug bites,
scratches from the grass above the shore, the space between
toes, dip between tendon and bone like a canvas sail. You vibrate

wave shadow, filigrees of liquid light oscillating beneath
the water over ground made alive and luminous under
water, spreading from your will. And you know this well,
that if you walk far enough into water, if you let the sky
absorb into cloth of your shorts, the bottom of your shirt,
if you kneel down in the water, half your body submerged,
the smell of lake salt rising in your brain, you know that you can let
yourself fall backwards, that the lake here lifts your body
back toward the sky.

    And you know that this lifting is pleasure,
so with your whole body you smile with all the water beneath you
and all the water for one hundred miles, a compass of joy,
revealing what it’s like to be held, to be raised by something
we cannot understand but with pleasure, with love, the water
sound lapping against your ears, and this other sound coming
from your mouth that everything on earth knows means yes.

Note from the poet: How do I know the difference between who I am and what I see? The lake brings me back to the sacred place, beauty, death, time. Light shocks me alive.