Mary Lake, Muskoka - but first a word about inspiration

Often, family and friends will ask me if they can read some of my work that has been recently published in a literary journal. If the piece is in a print journal and they don’t have a subscription, I have a few choices, I can lend them my copy, buy them a copy, ask them to subscribe, email it to them, or this new thing I’ll do here: publish it on my website in my Notebook temporarily (obviously after the journal has published the piece in print).

I’m grateful to Prairie Fire magazine for first publishing this poem in their Roots & Routes issue (Vol.42:3). I LOVE literary journals and would recommend everyone subscribe to them, but even I can’t afford a subscription to every journal, so in this space I’ll give a bit of a blurb on the origin of the piece and/or my inspiration for writing it.

Growing up, my family visited our cottage on Mary Lake in Muskoka (Ontario, Canada) religiously every single summer. It didn’t matter how far away we lived. We would drive from Alberta across the country to visit family and spend at least a few days at the lake. When we moved to Ontario, we spent many weeks there during the summers. Over time, I watched it change, influenced by what was called ‘acid rain’ in the ‘70s and when that problem was cleared up, a steady decline in clarity with the growing number of cottagers and the aging of their septic systems. It was such an insidious, gradual decline that those who visited regularly didn’t seem to see it as starkly as I did. The lake was like my barometer on what was happening in the environment.

It made me sad to write this piece because, for me, the lake is like a person in my life. We live in BC now and don’t get to visit very often so she’s become like a grand lady in my imagination, kind, calming and all that. I’ve written many positive poems about her, this one not so much. Still, sometimes we have to write the hard stuff because the world is becoming a challenging place in new ways and although we don’t want to carry the heaviness of it in our hearts every day, I think it’s good to reflect on it at times.

Mary Lake, Muskoka

Mary is one sister in a long line

of watery siblings: Penn, Fairy,

Skeleton, Vernon, Joseph.

She’s evenly proportioned, but shy

and alone, a long river’s remove

from the closest to her, Fairy

and then Vernon side-by-side to the north.

The thin cord of river that connects them is such a long umbilical

it offers her little.

But her head gathers the scraps and flushes

them through wind-pushed waves, white and rippling.

There was a time of balance

when Mary’s waters ran clear

but she would be the first to falter,

so alone,

so removed.

I’ve known her fifty-eight years

and in this time, I’ve seen her belly

washed with acid so that the fish

died, relinquishing her shallows

to lonely beds of clams in the mud,

their shells opening

and shutting like finger tambourines,

exposing white jelly thumbs.

She was irradiated and made sterile.

This in the time before

the pH in the rains and the runoff from her septic-loaded shores

caused her to reek

of algae. Before I began to notice

that my ankles soaked in the funk of swamp,

like weak tea, darker than my swimmer’s tan.

Mats of algae carpet the sand, plaque in her arteries.

I step into them and they split, guilty green.

I slip on the hairy skim of her rocks. Ducks and geese

have come in flocks to swim on Mary’s skin, feed

on her futility, her stillness.