Lake of Two Mountains Read online

  MONASTIC LIFE 2

  It is interior. Hidden in cochlea. Behind lenses, just under the skin. It is the sound of chair legs backing away from the table. Three times a day. The fragrance of beeswax. Soundless prayer. Morning mist, incense lifting from the censer’s broad swing.

  Not the censer. Not the convex of the bells, silver-etched, angels and stars. Not twelve wheels of cheese or a hand held in the forge. Not the hammer or horse. Not white robes, hoods, tunics of wool. But the effect of it all. The bells’ seduction. Geese rising from shore. Not the wafer, but the wafer’s weight on the tongue, light as ash. Not the man, but the way a man disappears in the habit of all.

  MONASTIC LIFE 3

  It is confession. Inside: envy and anger, trespasses, how to forgive. It is prayer and the mother who still mourns her long-vanished son. It is God behind rib slats, God in the hollows of mouths. It is angels, feathers weighing down scapulas. Nightbodies flying through the solitude that sanctity can make. Alveoli-frilled gloriosa and clear tenor notes. It is waiting for the break-openness of clavicles. Snapping in two. Rat-scurry sounds become wings at the narrow night window. Wild roses twine round the spine. Bees colonize the innermost ear.

  CALL AND RESPONSE

  1.

  The Canadian Shield calls to the fault

  in Timiskaming Lake. The Shield shelters

  more than half the land. The fault, tectonic,

  replies with the Ottawa River, whose waters run east

  and spread at the place of two mountains.

  Becoming lake. In this way the lake is of lake,

  song of song, Deux-Montagnes out of Timiskaming.

  The lake there, at the two mountains, calls

  to the trees near and around, riparian trees

  on rocky shores and the terrestrials

  within two miles of the shore. Perpetual loop.

  One verse then the other. Connecting

  trees to the sand, the orthic, melanic, brunisol soil,

  tree canopies, consolations of climate.

  The way birds in the morning define the new day,

  call sunrise from night.

  2.

  The trees call to each other their own

  names: sugar maple, hickory, eastern white pine.

  Black willow chants the alphabets of green ash.

  Yellow birch calls to red maple, chokecherry to beech.

  They bear multiple names: formal, scientific,

  common French and the names that are Mohawk.

  And no names at all. Their calls

  travel through air, water, through earth,

  sedges and shrubs, algae

  and cumulus clouds. All conversing.

  Rocks and black leeches. Sturgeon, green frogs.

  Limestone and vascular plants.

  3.

  How does the sky

  reply when silver-backed leaves tug at the wind,

  blocking the passage to sea?

  Clouds ring with rain

  and the lake lifts small pewter washes

  in rows of applause.

  What listens to sugar maples’ clear amber flow?

  Rays: yellow and cold.

  Fine beads of drizzle

  hiss the filigreed ice.

  What answers flood cover drowning hickory knees?

  Clay or silt. Till or clay loam. Sap in the spring.

  4.

  Sugar maple is always and in all places attentive,

  alert for replies from the open terrain.

  The soil, fine or sandy, alluvium,

  measures the length of flood time in spring,

  speaks a name to the climate,

  the warmest in the whole province. Call

  and response: a dominant tree, Acer saccharum,

  a sweetness that humans tap into.

  HOW OWN A LAKE

  A child begins owning

  the lake,

  its lifting haunt in morning,

  its sun-slapped birds. Begins

  to own the rud

  that coats evening,

  sunsets hinged

  behind the gap to the west. Begins

  owning the islet that floats offshore,

  boulder-pinned.

  She upends smaller stones,

  plucks innocent snails. She claims

  the islet’s frogs and the ribbits of frogs,

  moves the stirring lumps.

  Owns the waves

  and the far shore that looses them. Owns

  water lilies bobbing beneath the far-end bridge,

  yards them out, lays them in layers

  on the rowboat’s wet floor.

  She owns water weeds that yank at her feet,

  tadpoles butting, which she collects, black leeches,

  which she salts.

  And the monastery across the lake,

  which she can’t see, does she own it as well?

  And the reservation across the lake,

  completely unknown?

  The duck blind near the point, she claims.

  And lapping sounds.

  And darning needles

  switching blue, and rapiers of grass,

  the briny pong, the smart of slime that chokes

  the small elbowed bay.

  And the lake. The lake

  begins owning

  the child, carves its winged shape

  into her young,

  green-stick bones, into places there

  where holiness will soak,

  and a loneliness she can’t hope to shake.

  KANESATAKE

  the reserve on the lake banners maple and oak

  sumac a warrior flag

  the road through is knee-high grass-flanked

  northward for miles only trees and grass moving

  no people no dogs

  your car driving

  nowhere you know

  until rain speckles the windscreen

  a sense of trespass the threat

  of a downpour

  you decide to turn back

  everything flashes by in reverse

  rain-splattered signs maples and oaks

  Christmas lights at the ends of the driveways

  hand-lettered signs or neon signs blinking

  eggs for sale fireworks cigarettes cigarettes

  Tabac Chez Nous and Best Butts Mohawk Gas

  once a figure appeared gas station to car

  then a warning: we don’t collect taxes

  for any foreign government

  and the flag red yellow and black

  the nine-hole golf course next door

  only two cars on the road a small truck

  the shush the wet road

  not that you live here but

  would you leave if you had to

  (your life being trespass)

  and where would you go?

  to Ireland’s south-west where your mother’s people are from

  or to Antrim where your father’s father or Glasgow

  where your father was born

  displacements and exile

  this not being your people’s original place

  can you go back

  to where

  you never have been?

  IMPERMANENCE

  elm trees dead now

  still fan-shape under your lids

  silver-roofed barns blister your sight in sub-zero cold

  a pharmaceutical plant

  stands where a woodlot once grew

  and the creek behind the McTavishes’

  is now covered over with fill

  the pussy willows

&n
bsp; on the hill near the creek

  ploughed under and gone

  but the summertime lake

  its vast runnelled sprawl

  reluctant in late day to let anything go

  your lips as a child turned delphinium blue

  your knife-pleated fingers

  pale as small fish

  WHETHER WIND

  I walk on ghosts / apparitional gatherings carry me along.

  Don Domanski

  the night you lost your parents it was

  evening first summer maybe August

  parts are missing

  the length of the shadows

  the mileage from Fran’s house

  to yours missing

  or never known

  how you got home

  why the doors were all locked

  darkness

  inking inside and outside your body

  you were nine

  but even your age

  or if that night

  the bullfrogs made any sound whether

  your dead grandmother hovered

  in front of or behind

  the outer screen door

  the kitchen window streaked

  reflecting

  you said good-bye leaving Fran’s house

  light hanging by threads

  you ran the road

  evening wind picking up

  but even the wind

  or if maple leaves bled to black if trees

  began hemming the road

  or if you wore nothing at all

  on your arms

  you knew only the night something lost

  whether wind or black leaves

  whether you found them

  Or were found

  whether either is true

  MONASTIC LIFE 4

  It resides with honeybees, rows of hives along wire fences to the west, each queen drowsing in the jellied centre of a world. Bless each queen, that she survives the freeze, that she recites sweet piping sounds in spring as icicles release the sun. Bless the orchard trees as they hold up their plain grey twigs. Fields of clover one day will levitate, hover in July’s keening light. Bless the workers too, dull-huddled in their combs: that they remember flight, uncup their double wings against leftover cold. Bless each monk who dreams of honey, pantried light, stolen to illuminate dim winter shelves. They are praying for forgiveness. And for blossoms to burst April buds.

  MONASTIC LIFE 5

  It is liturgical. Worship, proper times of the day. One time, then another, in order, each time reaching. When one ends, thoughts of the next arise. Quotidian. Before collecting the milk, Matins. Before resting, Compline. Before reaching God, reaching out for God. Everyone becoming a saint. Before contemplating the miracle of clouds or of fish, the hour’s office. To praise God. Who hovers over the ferns, over faces hooded in barns, the brown backs of cows. Life among maples. God in herringboned pine cones, in clams boring into the sand. Worshipping the wild horse-tailed sky. When wind rises. Snow falls. When sap varnishes the flanks of cold trees. Every season, God. And reaching out for God. Every hour passes ordained. In this place of yellow perch and bluegill, trillium and ribbon grass, all eyes know when to close. All eyes look at what they are looking for.

  WHOSE LAKE?

  My lake says the man

  with the speedboat

  because his uncle

  once owned a camp at Rigaud where the river

  breaks into the lake

  God’s lake says

  Frère Gabriel because

  he believes God owns

  whatever He wants

  and who wouldn’t want this particular lake

  My lake you say

  and the lake of your sister

  because your grandfather

  and mother and aunts

  and your uncle

  once owned the white house up the road

  and you stayed every summer

  and swam every day

  rain or shine

  Our lake say the Mohawks

  and the lake of our dead

  because they lived

  here or near enough here

  and died here

  if not from time immemorial

  at least almost as long

  My lake says the woman

  who rents you the room

  who owns the patio chairs

  and the curved turquoise pool

  and the long windy fore-shore

  performing before you

  and the house like a rock

  or a deity

  watching your backs

  LAKE 1

  The lake harbours no greed. Rain comes, the lake simply receives. Rain comes in spring, and the ice, in plates and in discs, moves east, leaving crust and a thick, ragged skirt. Grit that falls through, trail of a fox falling in. Everything is poor. Rain comes, and wind. Wind like a cousin, not always kind. Wind-scrub and wind-wash, rough play and tease. Wind drags the lake’s floor, casts up what’s past dying. Swollen boards from fish huts, rented in winter, towed onto the ice, bird wings, broken at shore, rotten fish. The lake has nothing to ask, its ear cupped. Its hearing fills with nothing but rain. Water rises. Herons shrug in rock hollows, frogs wallow deeper in mud. Floods well. Lake opens up, gleaning, a chalice brimmed to the lip.

  RELIGIOUS LIFE

  Daring move. The school is old, made of wood: one match would torch it to ground before lunch. Who’d save the children? Even now, old snow still shrinks their schoolyard. Splinters fester inside their pine desks. Each groaning stair, saddle-bowed. Still, God shoulders in – grade four, the last tractable age.

  He sneaks in through catechism’s call and response:

  Who is God?

  God is love.

  How long is eternity?

  However long it takes a dove’s wing to wear away the marble-hard world.

  God slips in at 2:30, brushing past the folds of Sister Zita’s grey gown. His beard swirling dust. Through the Stations of the Cross, through His Son, He enters their stories, their grade-four adventures. The man’s terrible gore, his thorn-tangled hair. Father and child, sufferings and wrongs.

  Once a month, Sister Zita fire-drills a bucket of flames on the unsafe escape. God tends the flames. Day by day, He replaces black snow-melt with spring. The wolves at the chain links are flame-eyed with want.

  MONASTIC LIFE 6

  Silence colludes with shadow, pervasive blur that underhangs archways between granite walls. Walk, look at the feet. One boot, then the other. Note how clay dries in stiff clots, sculpts frills around heavy soles. Note the monk-shaped shadow falling from boot soles heading away from the sun. Silence lasts a lifetime. Life lived beneath, burrowed under the sky. Say nothing: think only of God. The last consolation. Silence enters the body; the body does not enter silence. Beseech the Holy Spirit to haunt the chiaroscuro of soul. Watch the soup fall from the ladle into white bowls. Eat the bread. Be grateful. And for the boots that keep to the path. Grateful. Look down at the feet.

  DAD BEFORE LAKE

  Before the ocean liner, Transylvania:

  homing pigeons on the coal-scuttle roof,

  pink and pearl grey, tin grey with rainbows,

  and white with red feet:

  Maggie and Nessie, Mrs. McWing.

  Before Montreal: Mossend, west of Glasgow,

  the old Bloch Hearn Yards on the Clyde where his father

  slung sheets of hot steel, each one

  the size of a bed. Family home,

  a block from the pub.

  Before the lake: Montreal, new,

  and the French, Jamaicans and Jews.

  The Protestants he already knew how to hate.

  Be
fore the lake: the Depression.

  Not enough food or work. The wagon horse. Winter

  on the treacherous ice.

  Before my mother, he organized dances,

  wore dress suits, lapels like dark folded kites.

  After my mother: the lake.

  He called the lake Shangri-La.

  SWIMMING UNDER THE OVERHEAD FIXTURE

  in measured strokes the crawl

  right arm then the left head and backbone

  aligned head-pivot

  synchronizing drawn-back elbows

  first one up a piston

  breathing in

  breathing out

  then the other

  all along the long hallway

  two feet below

  the stained plaster ceiling

  no windows

  fingertips glancing against

  the overhead fixture’s

  bevelled-glass rim

  feet flutter-kicking toes

  grazing the wallpaper once

  once kicking a framed watercolour

  right off its nail

  the end-stop faraway door

  unopened maybe sealed

  each stroke defying

  the unfluid laws of aerodynamics

  the air warm and unwet

  somehow buoys the methodical flight

  arms tire then

  a careful stroke-switch to the breast

  head down legs frogged

  and push push again

  the continuous risk of the height

  a thin carpet runner on the far-below floor

  headroom capped cobwebs

  and the small distant door

  still unopened unmoved

  DAD IN THE LAKE

  Lewd, his close-fitting jersey-knit

  swimsuit, della robbia blue, drawstring

  at his waist, dark hair coiled on his chest,

  his sinewy thighs,

  his knees, small onions, ivory-hued.

  His pale feet, unprotected, rock him

  down to the edge. And in. He stumbles

  on the slip of stones, almost pitches,

  before the shallows knee-deepen,