The spruce along the road 
is clearly dead, no green 
boughs to blend with others—
so many greens, it’s impossible 
to name them. Fiddlehead ferns, tall 
popple with shaking leaves, 
wide hearts of basswood. White 
oaks waving, branches dipping, 
ground cover teeming with green 
and mosquitoes and tiny gnats. 
This dead spruce, with its tarnished 
needles glows like an orange torch. 
Even in death there is beauty. 
Each night loons mourn the loss;
The moon lights the lake with fire.
                        

Lakes have been pressed into the earth 
by the rocky thumbs of glaciers, 
the ice pulled back, leaving 
its meltings behind, leaving kettles
and moraines and riots of rocks.
In Wisconsin, there are 59 lakes
named Long Lake, sometimes two
in a county. There are 82 named Bass
which might or might not be jumping
with them, and 116 named Mud.
In Wisconsin we boast that we have 
more lakes than Minnesota 
which claims 10,000. It all 
depends on how you define a lake. 
Wisconsin defines a lake as something 
more than a finger’s width deep—
like the lake of your bird bath, 
the lake in your dog’s water dish 
or the deep wet pools of your eyes.
                        

Before stars were stars, before 
they shined over the Hollywood sign 
in Griffith Park, the biggest debuts 
were Pleistocene mammoths
who stepped into the wide lake 
of asphalt at the center of the city 
before it became a city, the shore 
a sticky, black chaos covered in dust 
and leaves. Maybe mother mammoth
went looking for her calf who was stuck. 
Then she became part of the mire.
Then saber tooth tigers took 
advantage of their good fortune, 
so many meals too easy to resist. 
Dire wolves showed up to snack 
on the tigers, and so the story goes, 
the birth of a food chain, perhaps, 
mammoth and tiger and wolf 
howling misery into the dark night. 
Today you can see them in their mucky glory, 
smell their petrified breath—hear 
the tangle of traffic near La Brea 
and Wilshire in this the city of angels 
and devils, the tar pits still a-bubble
waiting, like old stars, to be noticed again.