Lake (from 1988, for want of something else to do)

What is at the bottom of a lake (Maranacook)
but crawfish, minnows, white and yellow perch, band-aids
that float above the silt, loosened from the swimmers' limbs
or a gold-plated bracelet with "KAREN: 14K" on its nameplate,
nearly lost where silt or sand concealed its broken chain.
And depth where silt begins from sand, imported from shore,
is slippery as raw life-- why we don't like to tread on it.

Mostly what's beneath this roped-in space are band-aids stripped
from arms that dismiss air, or babies who play dead men
secure in the forearms of their fathers tanned by days of labor.
Snorklers undertake treasure, but soon decide to turn
their visors to fledgling crawfish by stems of aqueous plants
or schools that try to cross the water's agitation.

Swimming instructors, ignoring splashes, backstroke,
breast-stroke, crawl beside a necklace of baby-blue pontoons
that mark what's safe to tread from the rest: that lies beneath
broken motor-oil membranes pierced by loons, where last night
partiers drove Boston Whalers home after a very big party indeed.

That's where plumb-lines of sunlight that would greet a diver
as he surfaced do not penetrate the murk of upstirred silt.
Vague speculation fires curiosity on shore to dive or ponder.
Maybe a handful of Abnaki objets d'art undulate down there--
spearheads or nets maybe, or nothing but loosely-tied flies

cast by amateur fishermen, bass and perch wised-up to glitter
until they just suspend above the silt like tossed jewelry,
or the waterlogged firecrackers dropped to shock snappers
by a teenage incendiary so he could inspect their red bellies.
(Their rinds cannot be distinguished from tree bark.)
Wonder even beguiled me to think a barbeque sauce jar,
its Armor brocaded by soil, and used for baitworms,

was antique. But what memento mori beckons you,
explorer, who buys cheap and sell dear? The lake is filling up
with trinkets, like silver dollars in the bank accounts
of the deceased. How these lakes are inlaid with the limits
of appetite: item: bottles hurled from the shore are messages
without labels, enigmas around which riddles have unwrapped.

[Curiosity would spade and drain this lake to empty basin,
a Pandora's box for excavation-- but better it lie, be this.]