The ice went out

It happened sometime in the night. I walked down to the lake before six and the surface was open water, gray and flat, breathing.

There is a sound that comes with it — not the ice breaking, which I have heard and which is loud and startling and nothing like what you expect — but the sound after. A kind of silence that is different from the silence the ice makes. The lake moves again. It breathes. The light sits differently on open water than it does on ice, lower and more diffuse, and the ducks reappear from wherever ducks go when a lake is frozen.

I stood there longer than I meant to.

The practice goes on regardless of the weather, but the weather is not background. The morning I’ve been walking into all winter was a different morning than this one. You have to start over. New eyes for a lake you’ve seen a thousand times.

I wrote three poems before breakfast. None of them were about the ice going out.