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

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.