We cannot see the craft,
but only hear the sizzling drum
of its gas-fired engine
ricocheting off the top of every tree-shagged mountain
that shoulders this ancient glacial pond.
It declaims a music of the older sort:
flat benches strewn with stale cushions
and the rot of algae, dust, and motor oil;
a few desultory teenagers spilled around
its cavity like prisoners ferried
from town to town for unessential punitive tasks;
one letting his fingers scrape the corrugated glass
of the lake; another shouting a story,
which no one else can quite comprehend,
about how once he almost drowned
when his feet got tangled in a towline.
The others do not care that his words are mutilated
in the noisy air. They are content to be barely clothed
inside a motorboat as it bounces along,
like a skipping stone chucked toward its inevitable
who knows where.