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    Lake of Two Mountains
    Lake of Two Mountains
    Lake of Two Mountains
    Ebook88 pages30 minutes

    Lake of Two Mountains

    By Arleen Paré

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    About this ebook

    Lake of Two Mountains, Arleen Paré's second poetry collection, is a portrait of a lake, of a relationship to a lake, of a network of relationships around a lake. It maps, probes and applauds the riparian region of central Canadian geography that lies between the Ottawa and the St. Lawrence Rivers. The poems portray this territory, its contested human presences and natural history: the 1990 Oka Crisis, Pleistocene shifts and dislocations, the feather-shaped Ile Cadieux, a Trappist monastery on the lake's northern shore. As we are drawn into experience of the lake and its environs, we also enter an intricate interleaving of landscape and memory, a reflection on how a place comes to inhabit us even as we inhabit it.
    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherBrick Books
    Release dateApr 1, 2014
    ISBN9781771313650
    Lake of Two Mountains
    Author

    Arleen Paré

    Arleen Paré’s first book, Paper Trail, was nominated for the Dorothy Livesay BC Book Award for Poetry and won the City of Victoria Butler Book Prize in 2008. Leaving Now, a mixed-genre novel released in 2012, was highlighted on All Lit Up. Lake of Two Mountains, her third book, won the 2014 Governor General’s Award for Poetry, was nominated for the Butler Book Prize and won the CBC Bookie Award. Paré’s poetry collection, He Leaves His Face in the Funeral Car, was a 2015 Victoria Butler Book Prize finalist. She lives in Victoria with her partner of thirty-seven years. The Girls with Stone Faces is her fifth book.

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      Book preview

      Lake of Two Mountains - 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,

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