Light tears itself apart over the lake—
the Perseids dragging their bright incisions.

I believed you. I believed the lake
could swallow a man like a fish swallows the hook,
could hold him under fifty-two days

while the divers circled and the sheriff
dragged his nets through the silt.

The body rises, they told me.
The gases expand. The dead want to be found.

But you were already in Paris.
You were in Paris with Katya and her two children,
your new passport clean,

the old one reported stolen
months before you ever said I’ll be home by morning.

Thirty thousand dollars to drag a lake for nothing,
for a man eating breakfast in Montmartre.

Money for snow plows. For potholes.
Money the sheriff won’t forget.

We shared three children, a cinderblock house
I thought was enough.

Your parents divorced when you were three—
you said you’d never put the kids through that.

Instead you gave them
a father the lake couldn’t return.

I get the minivan. The tackle box. The boat trailer.

I stand where the herons lift off at dusk,
each one hauling its patience into the pines.

Some nights I sit on the trailer hitch until the bats come,
the water wood-dark.

I open the tackle box.
I touch the hooks.