Bear Lake Encyclical

poem #49

Photo by the author

At this cross of unhoused roads 
              an unbuilt county;
here's its wreckage rusting on its beach;
this iron body off the northern highway 
scabbed and dyed by rust and sunlight, 
strained the red and white of bearing knuckle 
baffling brightly muscled August’s reach
into the lake's nocturnal straits.

It lays a scintillation in black certainty, 
the insect chaff in evening chirrup,
a howling breach in endless country 
meant to scramble our identity.

In fog a blanket-covered corpse;
a cresting wave of leafen flesh
off northern highway’s shoulder -
bare lake, the mist will barely touch you 
with your dead pine fallen
in the nave of granite and your rotting roots 
in sunlight driving skyward for the canopy.

Naked like our faces when we sleep 
beneath your vault that traps the dreams
of bear and trapper both;
brave like settler bodies under beech trees, 
seething out the river
with its warp and rapid bearing down of will.

You bruised a red and violent,
nearly purple heave of brittle earth,
a rosed retreat of blackened footprints 
scouting northward highways,
skirting peaty graves of Mennonite and bear, 
both blanketed in blackened maple
out behind the rise of brick and tungsten 
palisades of Barrie, Owen Sound and Sarnia -

these the towns of unhoused bodies 
walking northward past this iron wreckage 
wrestling sunlight on the beach.

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Many thanks to

Silver Door

for originally publishing this poem of mine, and in so doing, helping to launch the Bad Catechumen Substack. I very strongly recommend Silver Door to anyone who has not yet subscribed.

This poem was inspired by a wilderness camping trip I took, out into the woods close to Bear Lake, four years ago. On it, I encountered strange omens, as one often does in the wilderness, which demanded some kind of home in language. I hadn’t been writing poems for years, and this trip, with its odd discoveries, distant(?) rifle fire of hunters(?), swarms of giant dragonflies, and questionable nostrums imbibed rather haphazardly, saw me begin writing poems again in earnest. I sacrificed a good pair of boots to the torrential rain spirits, who returned the favour tenfold (at least).

Nature is a filigreed bowl, in which the Lord provides all.

Cheers.

The mansion on Bear Lake