by Brett Rutherford
Edinboro Lake, PA
The used and tattered rainclouds come here
like derelicts, like old dogs homing, revisiting one place — one secret lake which
has berthed all waters (sea to sky to drawing mountain peak in flash of
storm-drop — this unassuming kettle of
liquid clouds, gray-black beneath the lidded heavens, shimmers at night under the nodding Dipper, the stars that empty it of excess rainfall.
Now I come back to you, wait for respite of
thunder, tread mud, walk flooded grass to the neglected graveyard, hark to the
wind waves at your overfilled edge, the lapping song of your careworn banks, the
hollow silence of your glacier-ground heart.
Elms and maples stand sentry. The ground is a
riot of toppled tombstones, limbs torn by gale or lightning thrust, fence
pickets torn off by age or vandals. The winds — or cautious townsmen — have removed the old gray trunk that hoarded
the shore like a sentinel (how its unmoving spindle arms alarmed the midnight
visitor! how ravens and owls perched there to read the runes of the waveforms, the
prophecy of wind and season! how poets and lovers sought it, the artist’s brush
absorbed it as silhouette defining the lake beyond!)
I miss that tree. If one of the graves should
vanish I would not miss it so much as that withered guardian.
It was the life work of a living thing, an
epic of cambium in heartwood. Its wisdom was sublimated from soil, drunk from
the lake of all waters, tapped from the abundance of sunlight, shielded from
frost and lightning fire. It made itself sculpture, transcended its own
passing, a defiant singularity, useless, unwanted, beautiful.
I shed my clothes to wade in the lake, letting
the chill-cold waters accept me, sinking until the rippled plane of water licks
at my shoulders, pacing with caution the rubble and sand of the lakebed. Not
for a decade have I touched these waters, communed with the throwaway songs of
the bullfrogs, the chirl of crickets, the paper-thin presence of curious
insects, the nudge of fishes at my knees, the velvet black flurry and sonar
symphony of the bats.
Cars hiss by on the distant roadway. House
lights blink out. Water goes lull, takes on the hues of blueberries ripening — black
and gray and Prussian blue. The loudest
of sounds is the breath in my lungs, my
voice as I call to you, lake of my youth: Remember
me.
I too have come back to this navel of the
world, this womb of the waters, this quencher of age and weariness.
Finally, your secret is revealed to me in
God’s Eye weave of the thread of time:
The Eries came here for a winter festival, carried
a gourd with the old year’s sadness, weighted it with stone, canoed and dropped
it at your quiet center, singing—
Hear
us, O Lake of Little Snows — Heed not the crane, the fish, the deceitful song
of the serpent — Heed us, mother of tears and rivers. We bring you a gourd, the
gourd our ancestors taught us to make. Surely you are hungry, O Lake. We have
come many days to offer it, suffered
such dangers to please you!
Calmly the lake accepted the present. The
gourd sank fast and never returned. In silence, the men returned to the shore, banked
their canoes and shouted with glee:
Jiyathontek!
O Konneahti! Onenh,
wete-wenna-keragh-danyon! Hear us, O Lake of Little Snows! Today we have made
the signs. Again you ate the gourd and the stone. You did not know the gourd
was hollow. You did not ask what was in it! Do not inquire, O Lake our mother. We have promised never to tell you!
The gourd had passed a year in the longhouse.
Each mother who lost an infant held it until the stream of her tears had dried.
The father who watched the forest trail for the sight of the hunting party clenched
it and wept for his eldest son. (They spoke of wolves at the council fire.)
In years of war or famine the gourd was
heavy. Women put beads or locks of hair inside it, stained it with rust and
blueberry paint. Feeble ones took it when their memory failed; it calmed the
mad to sleep beside it.
Unburdened now of the Gourd of Sorrows, the
Eries leave the forgiving lake, wash off their paint, their red-brown faces
young with laughter and courage, their eyes as bright as the ardent sun, their
strong legs running, running.
