This month’s Versed in Florida is with poet Diego Alejandro Fernandez, an FGCU senior studying anthropology with a minor in creative writing. He performs a sestina today, which he will define. He told WGCU’s Amy Tardif he never knows when the words will flow.
Over a Lake
A wind reveals itself gliding over still water,
giving the lake a skin, a face textured by ripples
and a beard of matted grass, eyes flecked black by cigarettes.
I trace the surface, construct a map
of water lilies un-bloomed and a contained stillness, a reflection
of inhabitance like alligator calm, a slightly stirring lie.
If you learn to listen, you’ll hear much, and all about lies,
about the beguiling chatter of this tongue-less water,
its sad revelation, its begging respite of reflection.
At sunrise it glitters gold as old soul’s skin, desert shadows over water’s ripples
and I can see the face remember, begin to map
its history of flood and blood and white rock as stone as smoke of cigarettes.
The stain of addiction lies un-evidenced, like a young man’s cigarettes.
The water listens as birds slide low, wings languid and wide as a lying
dreamer’s fingers flying across to distances unmapped.
Trees that used to dance wear crowns and robes of thorns as they solemnly envy the water,
free as he is to reach so far, they say, far as ripples
can carry, almost to the shore, almost enough to disrupt a watcher’s reflection.
And what has such an aqueous mind to reflect
upon? A memorable flower, bent to see her beauty, to leave a cigarette
where her face glowed. How envious of a river! Who ripples
alive with flowing dreams, who stops explorers ashore with lying
stillness, down, downriver, the sunlight crossing a diamond on water.
It is an adventure for lucky men to map
her length, mouth to foot to bed! But even the land between them is unmapped
for this lake who stares with sleepless eyes into its own reflection
as I lean heavy and dendronous over the water,
all one of the martyred trees but for my disintegrating cigarette,
forgotten as the days before the lake, the young age of lies
and humming feet, while the lake waited as a shore waits for ripples.
But someday I’ll go, too, and the lake’s ripples
will never quite reach the shore to lift foot over land mapped
so long ago, which left him a blankness - an obvious lie.
So the lake will stare at the sky, pondering an imagined reflection,
the clouds as plumes of smoke from the cigarette
remembered in that one’s mouth, the one who stopped by the water.
Old Greeks lied about people falling in love with their reflection,
unperturbed by ripples of age over the map
of their face. I should start smoking cigarettes, thinks the water.