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
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
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.