Canada Lake

 

 

1.                                   

 

This summer I drove my mother

around Canada Lake, avidly remembered

from girlhood, looking for a camp

still flickering upon the cave walls

of her eighty-four year old memory.

Her grandparents' house, right on lake's edge

with boathouse, dock, outbuildings.

It was painted spruce green in 1929,

and a whole clanship of frying fish,

swimmer splash, picnic basket,

slapped mosquito and deer fly

occurred in its mossgrown circle,

and great shadowy gray presences

bustled about, cooking oatmeal, changing diapers,

baiting hooks and shuffling decks of cards

under the kerosene lantern,

and every ghost had name and voice

and she could tell each dog in the night

by its bark, and even today she can recite their names,

Roscoe and Sir-Sir, Bonnie and Drummer

and poor Star who nosed open a screen door

and turned to wind seventy years ago

in the balsam-scented air.  Camp itself sold that year.

 

 

2.

 

 

And we drove around and around that shining lake

whose wave-slap and sun glint now rise in mind

against the fading summer heat this morning

a thousand miles and a good lifetime away--

for we never discovered the house of memory,

which has gone wherever that dog went.

A house perhaps dismantled by time's rot

of memory, or under the wrecking bar,

it hardly matters which, for in a few years more

my mother will also go, out on that cold

trouty lake in her leaky rowboat of impressions

and loves and flashing keen back-casts,

of squealy pumphandles and the jokes

of long-dead cousins, of the busy shades

lodged in her mind alone, now

that she has outlived them all--father, sisters,

uncles, brother, cousins, aunts, mother--

 

and her boat too will slowly subside below my sight

and lodge at last in the silty bottom

and that will be it for the stars

of 1936 still wheeling through their hopeless skies.

 

© David Graham

 

 

End of Summer

 

No, never an end--

 

No closure in the rank, pulpy husks

of black walnuts littering the lawn.

No lines in nature, just ragged, blurry close-ups.

 

Day after day the creeping damp,

largo of cicadas in the trees,

sap-heavy limbs ready for storm.

 

The pale green mists of late August

wholly without predicate.

 

No end?  No, and no beginning, either.

Day after day steady as my heart.

 

 

© David Graham

 

 

 

Scotch Movies

 

 

I like to see the old couple sitting

in their garage right on Route 23

with the door up, facing traffic

on a warm June day, newspaper unread,

 

as if we were the interesting ones

in our dog-to-the-vet station wagons,

our UPS vans so faithfully frantic,

first-gear dumptrucks groaning with gravel,

 

when the Mystery itself

has set up its twin folding chairs

in the dusky, oil-scented air,

iced tea slowly warming on a card table

 

between them, maybe a radio on soft

in the empty kitchen behind.  I like

to believe they speak at long intervals

about how the tomatoes are doing,

 

heat beginning to ripple the haze

over the highway, through which we plunge

with our designer coffee, our kids in car seats,

clutch of DVDs to return to the store

 

where they have never been, our couple

nodding like trees at the edge of the wind.

 

 

© David Graham

 

 

 

These Are the Days of the Summer Novels

 

 

These are the days of the summer novels

leaning confusedly on their jumbled shelf,

survivors of another long winter,

 

showing their age in coffee rings,

dog-eared page corners, a torn cover here,

an unlikely list price there, and perhaps

 

it is the muffled hum of plot machinery

we seem to hear, like ghosts in the night

moving across the warped floor boards,

 

all those births and betrayals, all those

strung-out longings in garden or train car,

a hundred fated encounters and farewells

 

overbrimming the yellow swollen pages

of these fading paperbacks once loved

and thus not possible to discard now,

 

though it isn't necessary to re-read them. 

 

© David Graham

 

 

 

These Are the Days of Tardy Fireworks

 

 

These are the days of tardy fireworks

spitting and popping into the sky above the beach,

alighting the grandstands at the deserted stadium,

 

or dud-thunking onto the neighborhood pavement

to the puzzlement of curious dogs and children.

Meanwhile sparklers fizz on porches, being used up

 

weeks after the Fourth of July came and went,

like so many holidays we can't seem to let go of,

Christmas boxes piled in the corner for months,

 

Easter candy hardening in drawers, and it's all

of a piece with books unread on shelves for years,

dresses you'll never fit into again in this life,

 

stray keys in cups, high school yearbooks

packed away somewhere, or possibly lost,

completely consumed by the mice of time

 

in an attic you must have set foot in sometime,

for how else did your report cards get there,

your dead dog's leash, the broken knife

 

you brought home from Scout camp

and never looked at again, as far as you can recall.

 

 

© David Graham