I'm having a hard time getting a poem together that I've had brewing in my mind for a few weeks. I think about it everything I drive to my in-laws house. There's this lake we pass over -- Lake Meander. It's a recovery with a town underneath. Literally, underneath the water. Like a steeltown Atlantis or something. The town was deserted and then submerged. In my mind I like to think you can look down and see tables set for dinner and tattered curtains blossoming from the windows -- but probably not a Pompeii. The lake is freckled with all of these cement pilings that are covered with cormorants. It's a full-deck kind of image that just sits on your sub-conscious (like those sea-birds!). I started relating it to John Donne's metaphors about shadows: "As all shadows are of one color, if you respect the body from which they were cast (for our shadows upon clay will be dirty and in a garden green and flowery)." Then, yesterday my mother-in-law told me she and her husband (who just passed away two months ago) used to talk about the cormorants every time they passed over Meander to come to our house. So, when she was driving over yesterday she asked him to take the form of a cormorant and to lift off up from one of the pilings to prove to her he was listening. She said one of them did alight.
Now I just need to sit down, shuffle the deck, and write.