The Lake Dwellers
I shake from ill omens to find myself in the lake.
The birds around my neck fall-silent.
My bones are hollow as the oracle.
My head is high as the tide where you wash your feet.
The bliss of that ignorance was worth your hand.
Where are you when you wake?
Ask the gulls. They warble like tops
to that house out there on the island.
Did the lake rise to meet it? The gulls
know; it is passed down in their mythology.
Someone must feed the goat on the island
surely the fish do not dive into his mouth
crowded with bicuspids.
Every year we hear a story. Accompanied by a picture
a sharp white bow smashed up
against it’s makeshift coast. The father gives his forehead
to the wheel and his young son hears “baaahh bahhhh”
as his eyelids warm his cold eyes.
The island eats them up. That house is worn
with salt-less water and it’s paint is rust and blue.
If you squint your eyes as you pass it by
it bends into the sea.
The hardwood floors are gnawed with fiberglass.
The windows work for the rain.
The goat wakes from ill omens
to find himself hemmed in by the lake.
The bones around his neck fall silent.
His birds are full as the oracle
and he sorts their songs all summer.
| Josh Bauer |
|
levelheaded: The Lake Dwellers
While we doubt this speaker is participating in a sanctioned baptism, there is something similarly cleansing about lake water that allows one to “shake from ill omens.” The next line—“The birds around my neck fall-silent”—alludes to the albatross in Coleridge’s “Rime of the Ancient Mariner,” which likewise wrestles with guilt and absolution (“Instead of the cross, the Albatross / About my neck was hung.”). From these initial points of reference, “The Lake Dwellers” establishes a mystical, parable-like quality. This quality is hardened by words like “omen” and “oracle” which are repeated in the poem’s opening and closing lines. The repetition grants the poem a circular structure. It’s as if all the strange parts of “The Lake Dwellers” yearn to send us a cohesive message from the imagination.
Let’s start with the poem’s method. Narrative, according to the poem, is useless under the pressures of time and language. Gulls can answer the poem’s first questions only because the answer “is passed down in their mythology.” The gulls, of course, cannot and do not answer the questions in any way we can understand. Later, the exchange between an unidentifiable father and son is reduced to a goat-like “baaahh bahhhh.” Something compels this “baaahh bahhhh,” but not something we can comprehend. The speaker explicitly tells us, “Every year we hear a story,” but the story itself is left out because, like the rising tides and rusting house, it is an inexpressible, changeable thing.
The poem reflects and creates this changeability through its structure. Some lines let us in, and some lines push us away. For instance, “My head is as high as the tide where you wash your feet” gives us a glimpse of the speaker’s reverence for the poem’s mysterious “you.” There is an emotional logic in this line that we do not get from the following line: “The bliss of that ignorance was worth your hand.” Just as the poem’s ebb and flow of comprehensibility mirrors the lake’s movement against the island, the poem’s atmosphere—the “sharp white bow smashed up,” the floors “gnawed with fiberglass,” the “rust and blue”—mirrors an emotional state. This is both the poem’s cohesive message and the reason the poem cannot have a cohesive message. The described emotional state is like the house on the lake: “If you squint your eyes as you pass it by / it bends into the sea.”
– The Editors
