APRIL 1997
The Girl Who
Always Thought
It Was Summer
Cachuma Lake
Garden Without
Figures
China 1936
Cachuma Lake
by Annie Hansen
We wake as if in a choreographed dance.
Look at the fog, you say.
I wipe the window of the old yellow Ford
with my hand and say, No,
it is just steam on the windows.
But the moon. Look at the moon.
And you roll a little closer to me,
so close I feel your breath on my cheek
as you cross the invisible black line
you drew down the station wagon between our down bags,
separating the cool nylon folds where they touched,
drawn as you used to with your brother.
But this line was drawn at the awkwardness
of being 15, a man really, and yet still a son, sleeping with me.
Head on my pillow, you silently look out the window,
and we watch the full February moon cross
through the dark silhouette of ancient oak branches.
It is a moon light that bathes
those unfamiliar southern hills in deep blues
and dances across the water to us.
Yeah, you say. And we fall back asleep,
each into our own restless dreams.
And I awaken alone, later, just before dawn.
I wipe the window again and see that our breath,
no longer held by metal and glass,
has risen from desires a generation apart,
yet joined flesh to flesh by ancestral dreamers
who planted this restless seed in our fertile souls,
and has now flooded out to fill the wide lake,
cupped and waiting.
© The Raven Chronicles 1997