by Marissa Bell Toffoli
If it’s a season, it must be winter.
Underneath the icy layer atop a lake
a microcosm of life can, and does, live on.
I know this even though I did not grow up
in the kind of climate where lakes freeze in winter.
Once, in New Jersey, I walked out upon the ice
of a lake like I was invincible,
like I believed I wouldn’t crack the ice and fall through.
It was the lake where my mother had lifeguarded young summers.
My grandfather took us out in his canoe on that lake.
I’d swum in those waters in the summer on vacation once or twice.
I have walked its perimeter in autumn,
enraptured by the fierce colors of the leaves on trees that seemed
to frame the water with flames. An imagined fall, more alive
and unlike any I’d grown up with.
Though I hardly knew it well,
this is the lake I picture for the word lake.
