City Lake by Chelsea B. DesAutels

City Lake
Chelsea B. DesAutels

Almost dusk. Fishermen packing up their bait,
a small girl singing there’s nothing in here nothing in here
casting a yellow pole, glancing at her father.
What is it they say about mercy? Five summers ago
this lake took a child’s life. Four summers
ago it saved mine, the way the willows stretch
toward the water but never kiss it, how people laugh
as they walk the concrete path or really have it out
with someone they love. One spring the path teemed
with baby frogs, so many flattened, so many jumping.
I didn’t know a damn thing then. I thought I was waiting
for something to happen. I stepped carefully
over the dead frogs and around the live ones.
What was I waiting for? Frogs to rain from the sky?
A great love? The little girl spies a perch
just outside her rod’s reach. She wants to wade in.
She won’t catch the fish and even if she does
it might be full of mercury. Still, I want her
to roll up her jeans and step into the water,
tell her it’s mercy, not mud, filling each impression
her feet make. I’m not saying she should
be grateful to be alive. I’m saying mercy
is a big dark lake we’re all swimming in.

MARGINALIA

1.
I think about the children this world takes and the children it saves, and how arbitrary it all seems. How do we protect the ones we love from the very lakes that might also save them.

2.
What was I waiting for, all those years I thought my life was a rehearsal for something real. Standing on the concrete path, stepping around the small deaths and smaller resurrections, thinking the main event was still coming. Not knowing I was already in it—the walking, the careful stepping, the choosing to keep going.

3.
Times I have waded into dangerous water: loving someone who couldn’t love me back. Trusting my body to strangers in white coats. Opening my mouth to speak the thing that might change everything. Each time, my feet sinking into something that could have been mud or mercy—I never could tell the difference.

4.
I want to tell that little girl: the water will be cold and murky and beautiful. You won’t understand why, but you’ll remember this moment when you’re older.

5.
We are all swimming in something bigger than we understand. Call it grace, call it luck, call it the stubborn refusal of love to let us drown. The dark water holds us even when we can’t hold ourselves. Especially then.