by Arleen Paré
Those who live on the island
survey the lake’s changeable face,
theatre of water and sky.
They live among deciduous trees
growing down into the lake.
Maples’ thick leaves move the shadows. Sumac
tropicate near the bridge,
red velvet torches, green parrot fronds.
Beeches with pachyderm bark.
The small pinnated island lies light
on the water. Those who live there
know worry: the lake’s currents
and the whipped rivers of air.
They pray that the trees, their deep roots,
will fasten, keep this feather of land
from lifting into the wind.
WALKING THE ISLAND ROAD AFTER DINNER
Walking the narrow raised road
under the wings
of your parents, father starting
to whistle, freed from the house
of the sisters-in-law, blackbird
with hands in his pockets,
mother in polished tan cotton shorts,
house sparrow, wings folded
under her soft blousy wrap.
Asking nothing.
What were their thoughts? You
are content just to stroll
with them,
hover close to their silky coverts.
Sometimes you stop
to burst the orangey weed-flowers,
tap them or blow, seed after seed
arcing onto the road. You and your sister
seeding the road. Asking nothing:
not the name of the flowers,
or the tune or the time.
Or how
your parents kept hidden
their back-mounted wings.
FRÈRE GABRIEL'S LIFE 4
It is penance. No meat. No speech. No guest who’s not family. No book that’s not God’s. No choice that is not Père Abbot’s. No fish unless sick. In winter frost thickens the windows and walls. Bed at seven like children. Up at two when night still blinds the cold panes and the bells begin clanging. Kneel then, head heavy with hood. Nine offices, each with its own special bell. At least nine kinds of work, each a penance. Milking in shadowy stalls, hardly seeing cow or the pail. Filing out to break stones big as beds. Pulling weeds, haying fields filled with sun. Hay dust swarms the barn. Inside, mopping floors, the refectory stagnant with beans, cabbage soup. Dipping candles, stitching stiff boots. Idle hands cradle demons. Even the silence is thick with merciless sounds: Frère Marcel wheezing through Mass; Frère Jean smacking his lips through each meal. Offering these up. Each penance wings a soul past the stone walls to rest in the willows that weep on the shore.
FRÈRE GABRIEL'S LIFE 5
His chewed-up lips. His hands like spades under loose sleeves. How he allows what happens each day. Permits sun to bake his pink, freckled brow. Allows Frère Martin to nudge him at Mass, eyelids shut tight as freshwater clams. How long this monk kneels. His slow gait, his impossible pace, the way he places his fork on the plate. Carefully lifts his light voice in high praise, stills his lips when in prayer. It is not so much that Frère Gabriel talks to God; every monk does. But that God talks to him.
WHEN HEAT FALLS
Mid-summer, the lake stares down the sun and the sky,
what was once thought of
as heaven.
A hot lazy raft rocks its complaints twenty feet from shore.
In the afternoon haze sadness
loses all definition. The sun
is another country, a martyrdom
of touch.
At forty-five degrees
the air congeals, props up trees,
human bodies, houses, erratic stones.
The heat lowers
onto the lake’s lassitude,
its small worn-out wrinkles.
It hardly breathes.
Fish bloat on the surface, loll their bellies,
wash ashore, pallid, appear,
disappear between rocks.
The lake prays to Oka’s two highest hills,
their rolling loft, unseen from the south.
June bugs pierce the dazed hearing world.
Words abandon flesh. Chokecherries,
reeds, milkweed froth the lake’s shore.
The shoreline slowly recedes,
beginning to shrink, the lake rising
in droplets, almost nothingness,
on its way into the sky.
CARDINALS, CROWS
Hear them piping one by one:
we are here, we are here.
Cardinal solos –
suns behind clouds,
almost papal.
Look up: each too divine
to appear.
Crows do not hide. They are
medieval friars selling indulgences,
safe passages, relics they lift from the eaves.
Holy cards, greased bones, bottle caps.
Crow tricks –
everything is at risk.
Holy, profane,
hidden, in plain sight –
the end of the world
will arrive
in the mouth of a bird.
LAKE 2
drawing cowls of quiet around uncertain space sinking through pebbles and coarse grains of sand no sound it spreads into grass lies flat for seasons timeless hovering even at shore a presentiment a mirage shape-shifting mesmer holding the surrounding rocks in place through reverence alone the air above claims no geography the lake needs nothing but river’s brown mouth solitary quiet as the dragonfly that quilts nimbussed gloss as the eel that ribbons the squelch as unlit fish surveying beneath cirrussed weeds even when shirred when breezes scoop atoms of foam even when the world slants with rain and with wind the lake won’t complain white noise alone nothing the ear can locate even in early morning when heron spears frog no sound will ring out
GHOSTS MOVING IN FORESTED SHADE
light through the low woods
unbinds clavicle soles
trompe l’oeil
deciduous shadow and shudder
quiver with unabashed shine
what is fixed in the truth is in flux
sleights the eye there is goodness
there are ghosts moving
faster than wind through low bush and leaves
they move more surely than light
SUMMER ENDS
mist then as August tapers
to September lifts
the lake’s surfeit heat
night chills the breakfast milk
oak leaves still frill
the kaleidoscoped sky
the mist slips off by ten
no one has died yet
no one swims until noon
no one speaks of the end
leaf water child
THINGS CHANGE
a bird keening in flight
the shape of a marsh hawk shadow
with malevolent wings
the lake is benign now steadfast
why imagine it flying away
small mammal heart
in its beak
LAST DAY
Variation on a glosa – Archibald Lampman’s “Thunderstorm”
toss in the windrack up the muttering wind
the leaves hang still above the weird twilight
the hurrying centres of the storm unite
an afternoon rain
starts without enough
warning though
to be honest you carry
a borrowed umbrella
walk the road
for the last time above you<
br />
the leaves toss in the windrack
up the muttering sky
the sky takes on rubbings
of charcoal rain-
patter paces your steps
but still you will not
turn back the umbrella
staves off the worsening wet
at roadside the leaves
hang still
in the weird light
you race rain for the cottage
where you lived as a child
quirk of the storm sluicing you
onto this particular porch
side door locked
new owners away you brace
the umbrella’s inadequate shield
wind shoves
against you rain streams
down your cheeks
directly upon you
the hurrying
centres of the storm unite
MONASTIC LIFE 7
It is gone. The last twenty monks left in a bus for a house somewhere north. Praise songs no longer climb the white pines. Prayers no longer smoke evening skies. No monk bows south to the lake or beats his gaunt breast for trespasses past. No confessions within the scent of the shore. No sheep in the barns. No apiary, no fat-sided bees. Only apples hang heavy from branches – and fall.
Night galloped through cloisters, cracked stones from the walls, trampled gardens of lavender and mint. Once, two hundred obeyed their vocations or their own mother’s hearts. So many chants. So many white robes. In their small well-waxed cells, devotions and the splitting of hypothetical hairs. So much cider; there was honey and cream.
MONASTIC LAKE
Liturgical in its way, the lake unfolds, arising in wavelets in morning, changing with weather or time of day, without evidence of sorrow or blame. The water claims nothing for itself. Without hue or clear shape, it allows what gathers around it – air’s blue, palimpsests of horsetail in flight. Mud washes in from the Ottawa’s tongue, silting through. Summer sun beats the water to bronze. Where rocks curve, the lake bends. It sinks to its depths, evaporates or floods according to season and year. Even its storms bequeath hush. Scent of fish dying, algal bloom, clams broken on shore. Anything that passes through is transformed. Who watches, finally revealed. How self submerges itself, metaphor for mystery, drowning, escape.
WHAT'S UNDER
fish down there tadpoles smallmouth bass
red-eyed bicycle tires musky pike
walleye and drum
a fishing hut that fell through the ice four years ago
three cases of beer the owner out for a leak
made it to shore
perch sunfish catfish rosary beads bibles
carp bullets the sturgeon finally returned
they bump around in the murk
nose a ten-horsepower motor
a rotary phone
garpike down there and minnows in shallows
risking jars and small nets
minnows like sudden cartoons
the neighbour fishes
but not through the ice
wood ducks in spring dabble
feet paddle the water
mallards all summer long tipping up
going down
EIGHT MILES TO THE CENTER
You watch how water accommodates wind,
how the lake turns direction, curls
its lips white, turns colour, almost
opaque, from root-brown to light nickel-grey,
textured and fringed, turns its mind
to the shore.
In the middle of things
you’ve been given a place.
Eight miles to the centre.
What difference if the lake changes –
or if you belong? This water,
this spring-flooded land, cannot happen
in exile. The lake you are left with:
algae, neon-lime silk, skeins of it, spun
out of nowhere, untroubled cumulus blooms.
SUN GOING DOWN
Nine o’clock, the hour of the sun
going down, listing to the south.
The drowsing dark lake
shushes itself on the shore.
Divinity lingering this way.
Nine o’clock, the hour of fox
on the move. Hour of closing,
the sky closing over,
heat losing its hold.
Fox stealing slow
as the sun,
going down
to the shore,
looking for fish.
Acknowledgements
Many thanks to Lorna Crozier, my caring and exacting MFA supervisor, who encouraged and guided Lake of Two Mountains from its inception. Without her, this project simply would not have been realized. Appreciation also to other members of the University of Victoria’s Creative Writing Department, both fellow students and faculty, especially Tim Lilburn and John Barton. Much gratitude to Sue Chenette, my very thoughtful editor, who helped to shape the final version. To my sister, Donna Sharkey, who understands the childhood experience of the Lake better than anyone I know, many thanks for being there. Thanks to the people of L’Île-Cadieux, especially the mayor, his wife and the town’s secretary for their efforts to find accommodation for me; Pat for her friendship; and Lucille and Francois for their hospitality. And always, enduring gratefulness to Chris Fox, my companion and first reader for so many years.
Thanks also to Ursula Veira of Leaf Press, editor of the chapbook anthology, What Else Could I Dare to Say, where “Whether Wind” first appeared.
Biographical Note
Arleen Paré is a poet and novelist with an MFA in Creative Writing from the University of Victoria. Her first book, Paper Trail, won the Victoria Butler Book Prize and was a finalist for the Dorothy Livesay B.C. Book Award for Poetry. Her second book was a mixed-genre novel entitled Leaving Now. Paré’s writing has appeared in several Canadian literary journals and anthologies. Originally from Montreal, she lived for many years in Vancouver, where she worked asa social worker and administrator to provide community housing for people with mental illnesses. She now livesin Victoria with her partner, Chris Fox.
Library and Archives Canada Cataloguing in Publication
Paré, Arleen, author
Lake of two mountains [electronic resource] / Arleen Paré.
ISBN 978-1-926829-87-6 (pbk.)
I. Title.
PS8631.A7425L35 2014 C811’.6 C2013-907368-X
Copyright © Arleen Paré 2014.
We acknowledge the Canada Council for the Arts, and the Ontario Arts Council for their support of our publishing program.
Cover image, design and layout by Cheryl Dipede.
The author photo was taken by Ryan Rock.
Brick Books
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London, Ontario N6K 4G6
www.brickbooks.ca
