Here is where was

Here a blue heron glides, wings wide, over the face of Sparrow Lake, the face of the lake glistening under the sun like crumpled foil, flattened by a child’s open palms. Here an osprey brushes sunfish from the lake’s green, ungroomed hair. Hear the late Canadian National rail wail away across the water, its line defining the horizon coniferous. Hear the campers sing the nonsense song we teach them—lots of clouds move the mountains, and the water’s full of stars—to erase the songs that made less sense a century ago.

Where our fathers, rampant forebears and raw-winded ghouls, licked here down to its lichen-coated bones—what lips it had were tattered and bloody—bit open the rocky spine here and burned it black, whose fires fed on toxic marrow their tongues coaxed from deep stones, who cut their rough tongues on this shield asking where is here, who loosed here a strife of starlings, who evicted the loon, who left us this bereft new world whose true name now drops from the mandibles of bees on antibiotics.

Where the campers call the canoe-tripping river The Caché. Were you to tell Er that name sounds incongruous, urbane, she would tell you the river’s real name, Kosheshebogamog. Where nobody anymore knows what that means. Where dragonflies bite each other in half. Where you say nothing without waving a pair of pine branches for antennae, without learning the redwing blackbird’s song, spilling like rain over stony rapids, without canonizing the mosquito, without dreaming of fire when you sleep in your tent. Where is here? Here was beauty and here was nowhere.

Here it’s not the silence that unravels you, it’s the Babel of ten thousand untranslated tongues. So here forage for found syntax, here tune your sap-sticky antennae to hear the frequency of cicadas, here chart new constellations among the soft strobe of fireflies, here teach the campers that, to capture the flag, both teams must wear red. Here come home to your patience, like a mantis climbs a railway tie. Here give your love to the mosquitoes. Your stolen blood strafes the sky.