Lake Purdy
Seething with new life, the whole cosmos is present around this one body of water, where the young people are nightswimming.
shadowy steam-fog night, ripe with July
clouds ready to downpour more gravy
plus a snippet of moon dust, just enough
to paint the indigo shore where we left our shoes
and the opposite beach, our aim, a shriek of ash—
we didn’t absorb that we could’ve drowned,
seven or eight of us free as catfish and shellcrackers
briefly turning on our backs midway to watch
a coal-black cloud drift eastward easing up
on the dark until the world never shone so bright
so as to brew up a kaleidoscope of puddle ducks
dunking gilt bills in silvery mudflats, a lone fisherman
waist deep with chin pitched upward, blackjack
oaks and river birches, elbow to elbow, blending
their leaves in a swirling, spellcasting breeze—
just what we were doing as children of matter
afloat and probing at sublimity two hundred
thousand miles from a stony satellite echoing sun-
light as if answers were merciful and loneliness
weren’t waiting for us just as still as a cottonmouth
About the author
Originally from Birmingham, Alabama, Elizabeth S. Gunn serves as the Dean of the School of Arts, Sciences, and Business at Nevada State University. She writes poetry and fiction in Henderson, where she and her wife live with their three rescue pups in the endless Mojave Desert.