Before it was called Lake Richardson,
it was Molechunkamunk.

A name that sounds
less like ownership

and more like weather.

It means “stream in a deep ravine”
in Abenaki.

I think about this
whenever a place
gets renamed
into something
recognizable to the people
who took it.

As though difference
is a problem to be solved

rather than a way
to love other people.

The Rangeley Lakes hold
a particular kind of quiet.

Not absence.

But density.

Water that has learned
how to be still
without forgetting
it is moving.

On the surface,
boats trace small corrections.

Fish revise their routes
underneath.

The lake continues
whatever it was doing
before language arrived.

It was once a river
at the bottom of a ravine.

A moving system
with its own grammar of direction.

Then it was dammed—

for fishing,

for logging,

for control of flow.

Each purpose
arriving like a new explanation
laid over the same body of water.

Now it generates electricity.

Converted motion.

Stored pressure
released as light elsewhere.

The land itself
partly owned by a hydropower company
that, ironically,
keeps it undeveloped.

Allows it to return
to its original wilderness.

As though the final form
of extraction

is silence.

Molechunkamunk
sounds like a system
older than exploitation.

Older than maps
that pretend to finish
the world.

I try to say it
the way it might have been said
before it was written down.

Molechunkamunk.

Like a body
remembering
a forgotten motion.

Recognition
is not the same
as possession.

Something can be known
without being marked.

I stand at the edge
of the water
and imagine
the older name
still existing
beneath the surface,
moving slowly
under the new one,
being whispered by
the birch trees and
driftwood
lining the shore.

The trees remember
the ravine below.