Lake Poem

When I think of grief I think of the lake, that vastness
you saw from your home and I from mine.
Your house on the North Shore, my grad school
apartment in Hyde Park. Your fair-haired children

and my solitude. I think of Lake Shore Drive,
Art Deco apartment buildings like jewels on a string
looping an uncrossable distance, longing’s throat.
I remember the mulberry tree hanging over my fire escape--

that time I gathered its berries in my pink sundress,
wishing for you, though they weren’t meant for you,
and somebody took a picture, and the dress got stained.
But they tasted too sweet and somehow wrong,

the way the lake is almost an ocean but not quite;
water that’s without salt and lacking tides,
a body not the source of original life. It flows
into a river inverted by locks and canals.

An imaginary ocean, maybe, the way what I felt
for you was something I imagined, was really
something primal that I hungered for. That’s the story.
You had a daughter and she shares my name,

that’s another, isn’t it? I said the word, you didn’t
hear it as I meant you to. So I won’t put it in
this poem, which is only a Chicago poem, a lake poem,
in which I will make geography the central character.

I remember how I’d lie out on the rocks, then slip
into the lake in summer. How shock would take my breath
the water was so cold. The waves that pull you,
the current that could drown you simply doing what it does.

Anne Myles retired in 2019 as an English professor at the University of Northern Iowa, and is working on an MFA in poetry at the Vermont College of Fine Arts. Her poetry has appeared or is forthcoming in journals including Lavender Review, Ghost City Review, Isacoustic, Whale Road Review, Green Briar Review, and North American Review.