Crater Lake

by

Jeanne Wagner

I’ve read when someone talks

we stare

at one side of the face,

unlike the way we look at, say,

a sand dollar or a daisy,

the full moon.

Even dogs gaze into one eye,

looking

for the side that loves.

The winter after our baby died,

we drove to Crater Lake.

Those were days I could barely stand

to leave home. Grief itself

a dislocation.

The thing about Crater Lake

was its barren circularity,

that stingy shore with no swimmers,

no boaters, no slipstreams breaking the surface.

A cyclops of a lake.

There’s a photo of me feeding the chipmunks

that swarmed the ranger station.

I remember their eyes,

protuberant with hunger, their sharp little claws.

How they clutched at me,

clinging to my hand.

But look at how we’re gazing at each other,

eye to eye,

each certain of the other’s need.

Jeanne Wagner is the author of four chapbooks and four previous full-length collections: The Zen Piano-mover, which won the NFSPS Poetry Prize, In the Body of Our Lives (Sixteen Rivers Press), Everything Turns Into Something Else, published as runner-up for the Grayson Book Prize and, most recently, One Needful Song, winner of the 2024 Catamaran Poetry Prize. Her work has appeared in North American Review, Cincinnati Review, Alaska Quarterly Review, Shenandoah and The Southern Review. A retired tax accountant, she lives in Kensington, California.