Tracy Zeman

Lake

Red-tiered purple martin house on lake’s fringe
the binding effects     the emergent traits     a single allele
separating now from before     or rather us from them
a wetland is a spawning ground     for musky for northern pike
& deepwater sculpin     depth-dweller
mottled gray & brown     once thought extirpated from
eutrophication     from Erie & Ontario     water floods & retreats
pintails & blue-winged teals search shallows for shoots
of duckweed or water plantain     a problem of alliances I told her
but this does not mean an absence of social order
a body turning into bone or wind     black-crowned
night-heron & least bittern shelter among the reeds
the heart of     a dense immateriality

sora roams
muddy edge
tail flicking

*

A once unnamed sea     ice sheets move like slow beasts
vertical front     brittle cavity     large fracture
as winter withdraws     we count white-throated sparrow
fox sparrow     red & white nuthatches     red-bellied & downy
a well-formulated body of ideas & practices     when we read
we talked of cruelty     the male northern leopard frog
developing eggs after atrazine exposure     a chemical castration
daughter puts out eggshells for the martins
grit for digesting insect exoskeletons
every small part collected     spring-drift     lake-shift
glossy-blue     to plunder all in our world of signs
underwater the heron’s legs like plant stems
as it hunts cricket frogs     black plumes trailing

snow-melt peepers
callout 
warm nights

*

Evolution is always occurring     a matter of
group selection within a vast hereditary code
the heron’s s-shaped neck in flight     black feet tucked
tightly behind     each year hundreds of thousands
of pounds harvested until the blue walleye is
declared extinct     1985     later taxon rendered
invalid     only a morph of the yellow pike     resting bodies
bog buckbean used as a poultice once     daughter slips
into my bed in the morning     warm legs intertwine mine
some amphibians only return to their natal ponds
once a year     most of their lives spent in woods
beneath leaf-litter or high in the canopy
a phantom construction easily violated

wood duck
searches trees
for acorns

*

Snapping turtle waits at lake bottom for crayfish
pointed snout     neck covered in blunt tubercles     
hooked-beak strike sucks in prey     concentration 
of PCBs makes eggs into decoys     lake light
preference for margins     language swells
to encompass    paragraph     polychlorinated biphenyls
puddle     downpour at dusk     little telegram
from dust     mallards dance on wet ground
summoning earthworms     green-headed patter
gene-culture coevolution & niche construction     
throws our story into confusion     human nature as 
a fixed property     philopatric defense     a still lake for now     
collateral relationships     & string fens studded with cedars

tree leafing
with black
crows

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