Canadian poet Anne Wilkinson
LAKE SONG
Willow weep, let the lake lap up your green trickled tears.
Water, love, lip the hot roots, cradle the leaf;
Turn a new moon on your tongue, water, lick the deaf rocks,
With silk of your pebble-pitched song, water, wimple the beach;
Water, wash over the feet of the summer-bowed trees,
Wash age from the face of the stone.
I am a hearer of water;
My ears hold the sound and the feel of the sound of it mortally.
My skin is in love with lake water.
My skin is in love and it sings in the arms of its lover,
My skin is the leaf of the willow,
My nerves are the roots of the weeping willow tree.
My blood is a clot in the stone,
The blood of my heart is fused to a pit in the rock;
The lips of my lover can wear away stone,
My lover can free the blocked heart;
The leaf and the root and the red sap will run with lake water,
The arms of my lover will carry me home to the sea.
Anne Wilkinson (1910-1961) from The Poetry of Anne Wilkinson, Exile Editions, 1990
Award-winning Canadian poet Arleen Paré
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 pummeled the world
hisses with rain iron-blue smell
and pewter light ringing.
Arleen Paré from Lake of Two Mountains, Brick Books, 2014
Two great Canadian poets. Both with September birthdays. Arlene Paré’s today, September 14th, and Anne’s in a week on the 21st. Poets, generations apart. Anne died in 1961 in a very different time.
Some commentators feel that Anne , a woman poet who died to soon, never got her proper due. She rose to prominence along with Dorothy Livesay and P.K. Page but fell into obscurity after her death. The poet A,J. M. Smith said of her poems: a legacy whose value can never be diminished. Arlene has risen to prominence in recent years through her 2014 Governor General Award for her book Lake of Two Mountains.
I was delighted to see that that both Anne and Arlene both had written lake poems. Arlene’s book is full of them. And Anne’s lake poem has come into notice since she and this poem seem to figure in one of Michael Ondaatje’s early books: In the Skin of the Lion.
I also have a strong personal connection with Wilkinson. She was born an Osler, same generation as my father but older. Her mother, a first cousin of my grandfather. As well as publishing books of poetry she wrote a history of the Osler family called Lions in the Way. In one of her better-known poems she shares a description, I can relate to as well, of her grandfather and great uncles who rose to great prominence in Canada: I was the child of old men heavy with honour.
And it so interests me that Anne comes alive as one of the characters in Ondaatje’s book In the Skin of the Lion. Katherine Acheson, who makes the connection between Wilkinson and the Anne in Ondaatje’s book says: The copyright information which precedes the title-page acknowledges the use of two sentences from the journals of Anne Wilkinson, which suggests the identification.
She goes on to provide more details from Ondaatje’s book: Finally, Anne tells Caravaggio about the poem she was writing as he watched her in the boathouse:”I have literally fallen in love with the lake. I dread the day I will have to leave it. Tonight I was writing the first love poem I have written in years and the lover was the sound of lakewater.” This describes, with Ondaatje’s customary brevity and accuracy, one of Wilkinson’s early poems, “Lake Song.”
I love the sibilance and rhythm in Wilkinson’s first stanza of Lake Song. And all those w sounds. How she creates the isness of the lake.
Willow weep, let the lake lap up your green trickled tears.
Water, love, lip the hot roots, cradle the leaf;
Turn a new moon on your tongue, water, lick the deaf rocks,
With silk of your pebble-pitched song, water, wimple the beach;
Water, wash over the feet of the summer-bowed trees,
Wash age from the face of the stone.
And Arleen’s poem. More modern, tauter. but no less lyrical.
sky collapsing from its bowl
shoreline waiting taut
stones dark as plums
When I think of lake poems I am always reminded of American poet William Stafford’s poem Why I am Happy. A favorite! Here it is:
Why I Am Happy
Now has come, an easy time. I let it
roll. There is a lake somewhere
so blue and far nobody owns it.
A wind comes by and a willow listens
gracefully.
I hear all this, every summer. I laugh
and cry for every turn of the world,
its terribly cold, innocent spin.
The lake stays blue and free; it goes
on and on.
And I know where it is.
William Stafford from Dancing With Joy, edited by Roger Housden, Harmony Books, 2007