8 June 2007 | Vol. 7, No. 2

Burning trestle, a refuge for prayer and grieving

by TODD FREDSON

– for Lee Harmon

As under an interrogator's light

or haze of heat lamp,

the homestead is shrouded by late summer. The lake

on one side, the marsh and its forest on another.

A patrolman approaches. I pull a seam of sod underneath

the picnic table and hide the stash I was given. All of the milled

wood is rotten. The boardwalk is dark and spongy. Planks

relaxed like addicts in reverie; pilings

sinking in the slough. Handrail pocked with fingerprints,

fossils left by others who've stood, pushing, as I do,

to stretch my calves, looking past cattails

and the depressions of water, to the spit of firs that wanes

into the empty bay.

I fall like a train—white smoke stiffens, lengthens

my beard—and land to my wrists

in mud, a mound of marsh grass, the flaccid

swords of wild calamus.