Lake of Two Mountains Read online

  Lake of TwoMountains

  Arleen Paré

  Brick Books

  Contents

  Distance Closing In

  More

  Becoming Lake

  Alnöitic Rock

  Under Influence

  Summer House Revisited

  Figments

  How Fast a Life

  Summer

  Map of the Lake

  Monastic Life 1

  Monastic Life 2

  Monastic Life 3

  Call and Response

  How Own a Lake

  Kanesatake

  Impermanence

  Whether Wind

  Monastic Life 4

  Monastic Life 5

  Whose Lake?

  Lake 1

  Religious Life

  Monastic Life 6

  Dad before Lake

  Swimming under the Overhead Fixture

  Dad in the Lake

  Older Aunt

  Treading Water

  Uncle Bobby

  To Oka

  How Belong

  How Mend the Years

  Angelwings

  Frère Gabriel Crosses the Lake

  Frère Gabriel’s Life 1

  Frère Gabriel’s Life 2

  Frère Gabriel’s Life 3

  Armies of Frogs

  Oka Crisis

  Northern Gate

  L’Île-Cadieux

  Walking the Island Road after Dinner

  Frère Gabriel’s Life 4

  Frère Gabriel’s Life 5

  When Heat Falls

  Cardinals, Crows

  Lake 2

  Ghosts Moving in Forested Shade

  Summer Ends

  Things Change

  Last Day

  Monastic Life 7

  Monastic Lake

  What’s Under

  Eight Miles to the Centre

  Sun Going Down

  Acknowledgements

  Biographical Note

  Copyright

  For my sister, Donna, who knows the water lilies that grow under the bridge.

  All that we love, we try to memorize.

  –Chase Twichell

  DISTANCE CLOSING IN

  flint-dark far-off

  sky on the move across the lake

  slant sheets closing in

  sky collapsing from its bowl

  shoreline waiting taut

  stones dark as plums

  closer future

  flinging itself backwards

  water now stippling thin waterskin

  shallows pummelled the world

  hisses with rain iron-blue smell

  and pewter light ringing

  MORE

  vision doubles

  the lake’s surface calmed

  trees displaying roots into roots

  their upside-down selves

  tree selves downside-up

  in the water where their roots

  touch their roots a surfeit of calm

  redoubles the lake

  BECOMING LAKE

  Start early. Pleistocene.

  3 a.m. Let the Laurentide Ice Shield

  wrench surface snow, blast

  great pans of pale frozen foam.

  Thunder out. Cacophony of cold,

  glacial-scour. Scoop a basin

  five miles across.

  Let the bowl corrugate.

  Beneath the plain,

  concavitate in slow ragged folds.

  Sink potholes. Shove mountain tops

  from below stony roots. Spall,

  brinell, press walls whipped with sleet.

  Penance the ice. Endure

  the murk, the minutes, millennia.

  Empty out the salt sea.

  Watersheds, drains,

  daily rains gelatinate the sky.

  Conjure blue then,

  olive-green, brown, streaks of violet gold,

  precipitation’s long sombre hush. Rubble,

  river mouth, almighty mud.

  All things fall away, sink

  into brokenness.

  Finally,

  ripple-scum and shore fog, water

  grey-pocked – but moving,

  currents, then caps of white,

  the lake’s silver face

  scudded with wind.

  ALNÖITIC ROCK

  Fits (this uncertain rock) into your hollowed hand.

  Muskrat-skull rock, mauved in places as if bled.

  Hole-pocked fossil rock. A cipher. Left behind

  when ice plates receded. Continental sheets.

  Ice on the move. Leaving what cannot cleave.

  Topographies herded flat, wide as the weft of caribou hooves.

  Hoof-heavy plumb of time (here and Baffin Island only).

  Or volcano-spewed, dropped from the sky.

  Primordial cool, old questions weight in your palm.

  UNDER INFLUENCE

  Jack-in-the-pulpit, brown-streaked and hooded,

  preaches to primeval ferns.

  Poison ivy inveigles

  these low-lying woods.

  The influence

  of wild-carrot heads, road-side

  orange hawkweed, mulberry,

  milkweed, purple vetch. Maple-tree light

  beguiles the liquid afternoon air, leaches

  logic, riffles the grey leather beech.

  The past develops under water,

  film fixing invisible forms

  the way dreams reveal

  what was already there.

  Bullfrogs horn the first part of night,

  half in, half out of the lake;

  each domed note baritones

  the last, migrations of sound.

  The past arranges itself

  under duress. Loneliness leaves

  its wet-animal print, darker on dark.

  Under the influence,

  the weight of the land, sleight

  of wave-length configures a life.

  SUMMER HOUSE REVISITED

  A notice on your house (which is not

  yours anymore): Avis municipal, le permit . . . .

  It’s hard to know what comes next.

  Your sister reads French,

  but the print is small, the notice long,

  and the day rockets by. In front, beyond the low wall,

  wind pitches the lake.

  Clapboard, tall as a sail, the house

  billowed in summer, but in winter

  it measured its breath,

  pooled silence in porcelain bowls,

  stashed haircombs, clamshells under the eaves.

  Before that sign appeared,

  the past had no end.

  No one is home. You peek through the dark windows.

  Who lives here now

  means nothing to you.

  Only the lake remains real, its abandonments

  slow as the stars. The path to the lake

  rucks over with sedges, gooseberries,

  your dead aunt’s muguets de bois.

  The water that leaks from your palm

  still smells like a cold silver spoon.

  A boat (not your boat)

  rocks on the white water.

  Shore grasses sharpen the air,

/>   scythe the wind as it blows off the fetch.

  FIGMENTS

  God and molecules, nuclei and neutrinos:

  you’re told certain uncertain things.

  Told this is your mother,

  whose coffined face you don’t know,

  whose dress is a dress she’d never have owned.

  If you could, you’d live below theory, subatomic

  notions floating unseen. Helixed webs,

  beyond life’s unparseable range.

  You’d believe in spiders, though they too

  occupy their own theoried world.

  On ceilings, unfalling, they attach, reattach,

  rappelling. Their silks

  unconcerned with what gravity can do.

  Your mother sat you, as a baby, in the shallows,

  the lake licking your spine.

  Her face then was all you needed to know.

  There’s a photograph. Part of the web.

  Everything beginning that moment,

  untheoried, exposed.

  HOW FAST A LIFE

  You stood at the end

  of the wharf, you and your sister.

  Cautious. In handfuls, your mother’s ashes

  catching the wind,

  landing on the lake’s surface.

  End of June, wind

  lifted your hair.

  Which is how

  it might have been.

  The lake is not

  a lake, only a bulge in the river;

  the two mountains, only hills.

  Your mother spent her summers here.

  She knew how fast

  a storm surged. Ricocheted across water

  from the far-off north shore.

  Darkness catapulting.

  When it came, the air turned

  electric. Even the house, chill

  as an icebox,

  every light going out.

  SUMMER

  starts when the Dodge

  downshifts drifts down the path

  onto thin tufted grass

  sinks into loose

  shifting soil settles

  in sandiness

  the small hopeless lawn

  aprons the south side of the house

  struggles towards its own rootedness

  hunts for sunlight

  through holes in the deciduous haunt

  two stumps one stunted spirea in new pointed leaf

  startled now

  by car doors which slam

  first one then the other

  summer starts

  when island air curls on girls’

  freckled cheeks feckless bare legs

  starts when the screen door unlatches

  and the thick door behind

  creaks its wood-swollen groan

  releasing odours of a weather-sealed house

  double-windowed for months

  caulked against cold

  as if cold could be stopped

  it iced the lake twenty feet down

  froze every sturgeon

  one fish at a time

  summer starts

  up the staircase iron beds

  guarding the past last year’s swimsuits

  hanging

  ghost torsos noosed on their hooks

  stretched overlong

  summer last on the bottom

  of the unplumbed blue tub spider legs moth wings

  drained into otherness

  last year’s ant traps

  shadflies mosquitoes houseflies in husks

  their wire-thin legs curling in

  summer starts

  from the second-floor window

  overlooking the lake

  the world open-handed opening

  into each summer gone

  each summer beginning

  in shore light

  stretching beyond the dark line of pines

  MAP OF THE LAKE

  Draw the map three feet long, maybe four –

  but not wide – on paper strong enough

  to box-pleat left to right, store in a drawer.

  Make it nautical, but add some terrain.

  Use coloured pencils, otherwise coloured felt pens.

  Base the map loosely

  on Oceans and Fisheries, Map 1500.

  Begin at page bottom,

  outlining an island shaped like a feather, stemmed

  to the lake’s southern shore.

  Pencil then to the left, curving the shoreline west

  from the stem. Use the blue. The lake

  is usually brown but no one believes

  a brown lake.

  This is a map, not real life.

  Draw rocks on the shore.

  In places indicate short stretches of sand.

  Indicate a tiny islet

  directly in front of the feather-island’s

  middle-north shore. Draw six maple trees there.

  Bend them from the waist to the east

  as though the trees are in prayer.

  Fashion the old-fashioned symbol –

  wind-face with puffed cheeks – in the map’s

  upper left. The wind blows from the west

  most days of the year.

  Scallop the lake’s edge to the left and up. The lake’s shape,

  a long ragged stretch –

  imagine the shape of a cloud:

  a bird with broad wings

  and no head; or a pelvis, wide-hipped;

  or a snake having swallowed a hawk.

  Mid-left, which is west, break the line

  at the place where the river runs in, the place

  where twin ferries, to and from Oka,

  pass each other from six in the morning

  till midnight

  when the service shuts down.

  Draw the two ferries – flat barges –

  in red and in white. Draw fourteen cars

  on each barge.

  To the south,

  at the map’s bottom left, print “Hudson.”

  Pencil in a fine horse and a rider in boots.

  To the north, print “Oka.”

  Here, draw a church.

  Use the silver. The steeple is tall. Indicate bells,

  make them ring but only on Thursday and Sunday

  when Masses are held. Inside the church

  draw a painted-wood saint, a young Mohawk girl,

  or maybe Huron, who is said to heal rifts.

  The rest of the time the church locks its doors.

  So close the doors – draw their groan

  and the slam. Draw the lock. Label the church

  “St. Francis of Assisi.” Once Sulpician,

  but that church burned down.

  The rift in the line is where the river debouches;

  it doesn’t need healing. Label it “The Ottawa.”

  Its water is brown, but again choose the blue.

  Colour the lake’s two eponymous mountains.

  The sun used to slip behind them at eight, but who knows

  what time it is now. This is a map;

  maps change all the time.

  Continue the shoreline along the top of the page.

  This shoreline is Oka.

  Show the settlement called Kanesatake,

  pine trees, a graveyard, some hills. Use the dark green.

  Fashion a flag, red, yellow and black, to remember

  the Crisis two decades ago. Bow your head.

  Extend a long line to project past the golf course,

  the town, into the beach’s pale
sand.

  To the right

  show the place where the monastery stands.

  Use middle grey. Draw the silence in blue – darker –

  now that the monks are all gone.

  Wiggle light blue

  to the right, past Pointe-Calumet and Ste.-Marthe-sur-le-Lac.

  Break the line. Here the water runs out.

  Break the line, once again, between L’Île-aux-Tourtes

  and Pointe Abbote. A bridge there leads to the highway.

  Use the light grey.

  Trains cross a parallel bridge: frame trestles and arches.

  Draw a freight train, draw the long lonely sound

  of boxcars calling to night.

  Sketch twenty small islets, maybe more, using leaf green.

  Hook up the blue line back at the feather’s short stem,

  south of the island: L’Île-Cadieux.

  Place a white clapboard house

  at the island’s mid-section

  facing north to Oka’s broad beach five miles away,

  the pinery, the former two hundred monks.

  Pitch its roof to a peak. Pierce the house

  with four rectangle windows. Make them look out

  over the lake. Use the black.

  Mark the place: “You are here.”

  MONASTIC LIFE 1

  It is exterior, what can be seen, touched, not just what adjoins the pure mind. Trappist buildings, granite-stoned, black and stern-grey, in the midst of bramble and trees. Belonging to this place, sanctuary, for however long the body will last.

  It is the maze of outbuildings: one marble-slabbed for white Oka cheese; one filled with barrels of apples rosy as Our Lady’s stiff plaster lips. One building to hide washtubs and lye. Hives. Barns. And near the barns, coops for the chicken and eggs. Sheds where tapers hang their long fingers to dry. A gazebo not far from the lake.

  It is the massive main building itself, which shelters pantries with shelves of gooseberry jams and mustards made from wild mushrooms. Benches and sills, halls, dormitories, single cells. A chapel lined with white pine. A refectory with seats for two hundred. Banks of cook stoves. Ceilings, heaven-high to heighten the quiet. Rooms for visits and rooms for prayer. A sewing room to repair torn wool. A room for the dead and for the families to story the dead.

  It is summer heat, the lake to the south hugging sloped laps of shrubs, its loping length floating with monarchs and blackbirds with red-feathered wings. The rest, inconsequential, nothing of import on the shore far across. The thin sky there reflects only want.