Len Krisak

As twilight fizzles out, the last few glints
Off Crystal Lake, decanted, stake their claim
To one's attention: evanescent hints
That seconds will elapse before the same

Insipid slice of what must be the beach
Appears—stale, flat, and profitless by now.
(It's fall.) Into the cordoned shallows reach
The swimmers' docks, as far as signs allow.

The roped floats bob like corks, as from the train
One sees it loom: what made the city think
To name this structure after Gil Champagne,
Then, giddy with sheer drollery, paint it pink?

Patchy with peeling stucco, there it sits,
Its fundament approached by phlox and mums,
The Spanish roofline scalloped out in fits
And starts, the windows grilled, the sands like crumbs.

Drink it in quick, before these whimsies pass
Across the hurtling window pane, to melt
In shadow, and your visage ghosts the glass;
Before no civic summer can be felt.

Some after-image then, may draw you in,
And later rise with second thoughts in sleep,
Despite the way, in bed, you splash and spin,
Sensing the double vision of the deep.

Perhaps then, fear that tingles there in dream,
Or laps like waves at waking's tilted rim,
Will bubble up and break, and make it seem
The troubling world will yield itself to whim.