by Arleen Paré
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.
