Lake Echo, Dear by C. D. Wright

Lake Echo, Dear
C. D. Wright

Is the woman in the pool of light
really reading or just staring
at what is written

Is the man walking in the soft rain
naked or is it the rain
that makes his shirt transparent

The boy in the iron cot
is he asleep or still
fingering the springs underneath

Did you honestly believe
three lives could be complete

The bottle of green liquid
on the sill is it real

The bottle on the peeling sill
is it filled with green

Or is the liquid an illusion
of fullness

How summer’s children turn
into fish and rain softens men

How the elements of summer
nights bid us to get down with each other
on the unplaned floor

And this feels painfully beautiful
whether or not
it will change the world one drop

SELECTED BY NATASHA RAO

I fell in love with this poem the first time I encountered it many years ago, and each time I read it I feel the same sense of wonderment. There’s a kind of magic that happens in the poem’s questions, as they invite the reader to challenge our perception of reality. In this way, it feels very much to me like a poem about how to move through the world as a poet, with intense observation and curiosity.

I also think this poem captures the lushness of summer and the kind of softly enormous moments that can happen when the world is light-filled, wet, and green. I love the way humans and the natural world are porous here, and my favorite lines are “How summer’s children turn / into fish and rain softens men.” It always delights me when these kinds of transformations happen in poems. The final stanza of the poem for me captures a feeling relevant to my preoccupations of poetry, summer, connection, and beauty: even if has no lasting effect, the most ordinary thing can be briefly momentous.

ABOUT NATASHA RAO

Natasha Rao is the author of Latitude, which was selected by Ada Limón as the winner of the 2021 APR/Honickman First Book Prize. The recipient of a Ruth Lilly and Dorothy Sargent Rosenberg Fellowship from the Poetry Foundation, she has also received fellowships from Bread Loaf, the Sewanee Writers’ Conference, the Vermont Studio Center, and the New Jersey State Council on the Arts. She has received additional support from the Community of Writers, the Hambidge Center, and the VCCA.