ROBERT FREDE KENTER

Loon Sonnet

(for Anni Albers)

The loon’s black head, long, graceful neck and yellow beak

is all one sees before she dives below the surface of the lake.

Cantilever-shaped driftwood branch from a broken tree,

holding the palm of light towards sacred thinking,

life, gliding from origin to end point. Post-Oligocene,

the representative of a million-year-old aquatic diver meets

a three-hundred-year-old tree, specious, a sonnet remembered

from high school, marching past corbel tablets of lions and kings.

Flickering, textile art, the hovering surface, shapes and patterns.

A mink carries its baby along a stretch of the once-never-owned,

pre-contact shore, between voice, discovery and fluidity, the stars’ 

carbon nothingness. Anxious labored breathing, to aspire, 

defining instinctively what comes and goes, the Moon, spotlight

orange between red pines. We touch annotations across the night’s 

lip, seed fruits, other languages, forms of songs, between eating and

saving. All we don’t know, towards embracing an infinite metronome.