Lake of Two Mountains Read online

  water slapping into his lap.

  Lowering now,

  body to neck, he delivers himself

  to the lake, hands finning below his raised chin.

  In front of the dock, paddling

  one direction, then the other.

  His face as it clears each popping wave –

  his eyes –

  how unsure where he is.

  OLDER AUNT

  The older aunt never swam, didn’t

  even toe the water’s edge. Instead

  she fingered cuttings at the old kitchen sink,

  geranium roots, pale febrile phlox;

  unnamed translucencies, gummy stalks,

  unsteady heads.

  Untangled their hairs,

  pulled their tendrils apart.

  Everyone else in the lake,

  she’d be busy with slips, fingernails coaxing

  filaments to let filaments go.

  Carried scissors in the skirts of her dress.

  Daily she turned each jam jar, each juice glass,

  incubators, to face into the afternoon sun.

  It lit up the stems, emerald smears,

  everything slippery as eels.

  No one could say exactly why

  she refused to enter the lake.

  She had her garden to tend: thirteen jars on the sill,

  uprooted things, afternoon sun fierce in the afternoon sky.

  TREADING WATER

  Spread your arms

  as though you could fly.

  Darning needles zigzag,

  their veined wings

  stitch the lake to the sky.

  Water, warm as apricots.

  Long grasses phantom the lake’s unfathomable depths,

  plumb lines of weed.

  Moted light shoots up from below,

  luciferin,

  the colour, up close, between cedar bark and ale,

  between weak tea

  and pale liquid gold.

  The scent of the water is the scent of green tea,

  or camomile, slightly off.

  Sun grips your bare shoulders.

  Your forearms, held over-long in the water,

  start to dissolve,

  turn into lake.

  UNCLE BOBBY

  Bobby grew up into a boy.

  Wrong decade. He

  left for the War, Second World,

  returning years later,

  a box-camera snapshot in hand:

  foot soldiers, himself and four friends

  lined up in front of a broken-down fence.

  Boys drowning in greatcoats.

  At the cottage Bobby slept in a cot on the screened-in veranda,

  half in, half out of the house.

  Old army blanket, and all night

  the wind off the shore raked his hair.

  Mornings, he’d sprawl

  on the wharf or sit in a lawn chair,

  slathered in baby oil,

  remembering what?

  His fiancée married while

  he was at war. He never did.

  Later – the house finally his – he glassed in the porch,

  wintered in his red velvet chair,

  cradling the snapshot: five soldiers, all boys,

  in the palm of his hand.

  TO OKA

  Once to Oka in a rowboat all of you once

  with a ten-horse-power outboard

  attached to the back your uncle

  yanks the cord yanks the cord

  steers his eye on the faraway shore

  the two aunts

  on the long middle bench bicker

  under sun hats made of pink straw

  your mother

  guards the towels in her lap and a box

  of marshmallow cookies

  a carton of drinks at her feet

  and your father

  strangely in the boat too watches

  the water fill the boat’s bottom

  scoops and bails

  scoops and bails

  you and your sister two-headed bowsprit

  dogs in an open-air car

  almost barking for speed

  and for danger

  something lurking the Loch Ness

  the waves smashing the boat’s low

  wooden sides pitching and yawing

  half-way the motor starts coughing

  almost capsizing this rowboat

  especially unsuited for deep-water crossings

  the lake gullies

  ditches and peaks the boat plunges bangs

  flat on the water no one speaks

  this family ill-equipped

  to endure overlong

  finally Oka

  showing itself

  the clear promised land closer

  father bailing the small plastic pail

  still in his grip

  scooping scraping the bottom

  uncle squinting now under his baby-oiled brow

  aunts in a scowl

  mother mouth folded

  the towels bunched in her lap

  ever-present

  especially near shore the danger

  something like anger

  a strong chance of rocks

  HOW BELONG

  Sleeves of worker bees harvest your arms.

  You are not sweet;

  you only want to belong.

  The river runs in; there

  crossings are made. The river runs

  in greys and in browns. Some days

  an inky-blue paisleys the brown;

  the lake, drenched in places

  by sky, shot silk.

  Bees busy your neck. They sing

  into your ears. Untutored,

  you cannot decipher what’s meant.

  Where the river flows in, the gap

  enters history, the opening

  where sun collapses from day.

  Though you know nothing

  of bee song or currents, lac maternal

  does not let you drown.

  HOW MEND THE YEARS

  let him sit on the beach

  my uncle in his lawn chair

  that folds like a stork

  aluminum and shredded

  blue webbing glass of Labatts

  in his hand

  let him unreel

  the past on the waves psalms

  pastures and lilies

  the cosmos blooming stargazing

  a blur he almost can feel made one

  with what he is seeing lake

  and the line between water and sky

  let him hum without tune

  he spools thin lines of bliss

  as if fishing

  hitching this place to the quiet

  promise of peace geography’s

  comforting shape

  this bluish-brown water this meniscus

  parasol sky moving unmoving

  unhurried as pre-historical time

  let him memorize

  the lake’s surface find

  in what he sees there

  something that mends

  ANGELWINGS

  their obsidian shine

  streaks the night window

  rectangular single-paned

  inside the house nothing moves

  the oak its leaves gloved shadows

  leans on the house

  slants it into the sand

  FRÈRE GABRIEL CROSSES THE LAKE

  the clink his knife on the plate’s scraped-up surface heel of bread rind of cheese pool of
red-clover honey his tread on the dining-hall boards

  how he crosses the lake after dark

  something heard or imagined sleight of noise behind the shed behind the cottage five miles across dark matter at dusk the heat begins to road-rise door open door falling closed

  how much to believe leftover sun well past children’s bedtime later night wind lifting the moon from the waves crickets bullfrogs bigger than bowls acorns knocking the roof’s asphalt tiles

  his past is unfrangible his form unchanging when he sits on the chapel’s pine bench when he places his morning-pale feet into his boots to walk to the barn to milk six Jersey cows when three mason bees light on his brow even then nothing alters his material state

  silent all day and unseen he lived beyond your child eyes light-restricted the far shore unaffected by clay or by clouds holding his breath his mother’s faith crossing herself when she knelt to spread wax on her yellow planked floor her lips moving

  if you say dream if you conjure what might have been how much will stay true how long his past hovers in faith if you think he was angel apparition his own quantum leap sleepwalker far from his home if you saw him once heronwing the broad lake surface-low if you add June bugs a sky-wash of mauve

  FRÈRE GABRIAL'S LIFE 1

  It begins at 2 a.m., the world still spawning slate, nocturnal paws crick-cracking bush twigs outside the black window. Apples asleep inside their trees; cows still barned. Bees waxing in hives. He raises his body, contemplates its seven complaints. In his small cell. Does he admit the concept: the cell’s darkened window? Or does his pride swell in such penance? If so, he must contemplate the bare floor. Snapping sounds. Contemplate the truth of this untimely hour. Socks like felted mats. He must pray. To his mother in Laval-des-Rapides, he bows his head. To his father underground, he dispenses his thoughts. To Thomas Merton, he cites each authentic word. He blows on his hands. He strives for bios aggelikos, but he is one monk among two hundred. Mistaken prayer, he cannot sheer himself from this life.

  FRÈRE GABRIEL'S LIFE 2

  God, the Father, fashioned the cosmos from nothing: not dust, not rock, not sand, not bone, not a mother’s womb, not spitting into His right hand, not rubbing two sticks together or breathing into an excess of blue-ish green slime. Rien de rien. From nothing at all.

  Still there are rules. Père Abbot unfolds them one by one. Permitting on Tuesday Frère Jean to visit his consumptive sister in Hull, and Frère Luc to hitch the ruined horse to the flatbed layered with honeycombs, jellies and cheese. Permitting no radio in the dining hall, even the day the new Pope is announced. No eggs except at Christmas, and once a week for Frère Gabriel, the thinnest of Père Abbot’s thin tonsured sons.

  At confession, Frère Gabriel receives the same penance each time: seven rosaries and five Ways of the Cross, which, as a rule, he completes on his knees.

  FRÈRE GABRIEL'S LIFE 3

  His own father at night would stoop, rifle through the woodbox to scoop logs and small splits, lay the morning fire inside the black stove, crossing one stick over the other into one perfect square, then stutter to bed up thirteen cold stairs. Each one he would count – une, deux, trois – as he climbed, every night, closer to heaven. One morning his wife had to carry him, his body, bone-thin, down the stairs, early May, one by one, unfaltering, just as the birds began singing.

  ARMIES OF FROGS

  After Tim Lilburn’s “Slow World”

  The lake is a woman who no longer

  looks in the mirror. She lets her beard bristle,

  forced to overhear strangers rowing their boats.

  The lake breeds black bass in basements of muck, keeps armies

  of frogs in the coves. Sometimes

  the lake chokes in her sleep, waking

  to bullfrogs, leopard frogs and green frogs.

  Leeches, pickerel, northern pike. All her loves

  circle her waist. Though no longer

  the chorus frogs, whom she laments.

  In the middle, Sea-Doos, speedboats, tumble the lake,

  carve up the waves. Late July, Montreal halts for two weeks.

  Police patrol shorelines.

  There’s a ferry to Oka all day.

  Near the shore, muskrat and foxes.

  Female mallards sit in the trees.

  Maple keys shrug

  at the lake’s hem. She no longer keeps track.

  Holy water and toxins, black-patent tadpoles

  with prominent eyes. Thunderstorms

  from the west. Decoys and guns in the fall.

  Once, barges for pelts and coniferous logs.

  Once, food smuggled on powerboats

  for the Mohawk behind the blockade.

  Beyond old,

  she turns ragged blue in high wind.

  Always heading somewhere downstream:

  Lachine, Lac St. Louis, the St. Lawrence,

  Montreal. Nearby, bordering the town of Ste.-Anne-de-Bellevue,

  Mafiosi inhabit their fortified homes.

  Mid-century, the chorus frogs abandoned the lake:

  harsh cold, the Seaway, fertilizers, tailings,

  a factory upstream. Their skin tinged

  a greyish-green tan,

  their rapturous piping, utterly lost.

  OKA CRISIS

  You saw the war start on your sister’s TV:

  masks and camouflage gear. Before that,

  you saw nothing at all.

  Until you knew what it meant,

  what could you know? High-school history,

  blue textbook, Fathers Brébeuf and Lalemant.

  From a distance, five miles or more,

  what can be seen?

  The lake, a spreading brown water

  coming to rest

  before it reaches St. Lawrence’s olivine rush.

  Fattened hinge,

  endless trade route, Old World and New.

  Two mountains, seen only from the lake’s centre.

  Wherever centre resides. Absent

  from nautical maps, and unnamed.

  Island cottages morph into mansions,

  mushroom the land.

  Islanders don’t return to the city when summer ends. Anymore.

  When summer ends they book a cruise to Cancun.

  The monastery, eclipsed, its functions

  stripped clean,

  is now a shop, old photographs on tourist display,

  the classrooms of a private international school.

  A funeral home, movie set, bells

  with no sound, brambled paths leading down

  to the water

  catching its breath.

  The reservation is a settlement

  plus several lots in the town. Owned

  by the Feds, purchased

  from centuries of history,

  Sulpician priests, City Hall.

  Unceded by Mohawks

  who keep living there, who claim it,

  time immemorial, claim the pines that secure the small hill,

  claim their dead buried under the pines.

  And the fish,

  and the fishing huts that stud winter ice,

  racoons and foxes, firewood chopped

  from the trees, the narrow main road,

  the farms and the horses, the Mohawk Gas station,

  eggs, cigarettes, neon lights, warrior flags,

  hand-painted signs.

  The Oka Crisis was a war:

  concussion grenades, AK-47s,

  barricades, tripwires, three months

  of mid-summer heat. One man died.

  More were beaten, beaten down.

  Long-standing tombstones,

  golf course expansion,

  who owns the l
and,

  what was taken, which priests, who owns

  the trees. Nation to nation.

  One hundred years ago, the Oka Church

  burned to the ground. No one knows who.

  Twenty years ago, police raided the pines.

  History—lake or rapids, seen or unseen—

  rivers on. Police cruisers, bulletproof

  vests, warrior code names, the army called in.

  No one knows how hate works. No one knows

  why the Mohawk

  don’t own the land. No one knows

  who shot Corporal Marcel Lemay.

  Morning,

  the sweet grass was still burning.

  Smoke started to rise.

  The S.Q. – sudden tear gas,

  grenades. The wind changed directions,

  the bullet stole

  through his bulletproof vest.

  NORTHERN GATE

  The northern gate, opening into,

  and out,

  into moving away

  the day you drive through,

  the wrong day: shining blades, territorial

  leaves, apples unready, jade walnuts on trees.

  No one walks on the road. No one drives.

  The hour is wrong, or the road.

  Just ragged clouds blowing all over the sky

  and a hawk canting. Kanesatake.

  So much green you begin to crave

  crimson silk, unravelling, want to be

  somewhere else. Shame, your shame is being in the wrong place.

  No one waits for you at the corner.

  Rain, one by one, on the windscreen.

  At the gas station, one man, head down

  as he fills his tank.

  No one gazes from windows,

  no windows seen. Houses

  guard the far ends of driveways.

  Wind wails a warning. Shame is

  the failure to belong sufficiently to what is beloved.

  Northern gate, opening into,

  and out.

  L’ÎLE-CADIEUX

  The narrow island feathers the lake,

  pinioned, points to the east. Scallop-edged,

  its rachis is paved

  end to end; its quill forms

  a short iron bridge.