by Alison Pick
Three days camped at the edge of this lake, August light of a Faulkner novel, gauzy softness pink can make with a beachside evening mirrored in water, the quiet lapping of alder and spruce, the natural world giving itself into the palm of summer. Lonesome and heartsick. Tonight, after dinner, after water is boiled for dishes, after the loon has opened her songbook,started in practising scales, and I’ve leaned back against my pack, thinking of home, people I miss, after I’ve poured a shot of whiskey under one raised eyebrow of moon, shifted out of campfire smoke, shifted again, after darkness unfolds its wings, starts its descent, a moose. The other name the heart might have for such a thing is grace. Hooves the size of salad plates, legs the height of my shoulders. He walks, regally, out of the woods, as though arriving fashionably late; clop, clops, into the water, all the way up to his belly. Then he glances back behind him, soaking in the dusk, the reeds, then swims the narrow channel, leisurely, head held high and proud. He climbs the bank with hindquarters bulging, an athlete going up for a medal. One minute later he’s gone. The moose is nothing less and nothing more than temporary—and yet there’s mud marking the surface where, halfway across, he paused.What to make of that slow look back, the single blink of eyes? A gesture to human heartache and grief,how it works to blind us. He took in the glossy, glasslike lake, the surface streaked with blazing red of summer’s immanent end. Then he turned his gaze on me. A simple gesture to light in August. Look, it asked. Do you see?
Alison Pick was the winner of the 2005 CBC Literary Award for Poetry, the 2003 National Magazine Award for Poetry, and the 2002 Bronwen Wallace Award for Poetry. Her novel, The Sweet Edge, was included in The Globe and Mail Top 100 Books of 2005, and has recently been optioned for film by Four Seasons Productions in Toronto. Alison has just completed a new poetry manuscript and is starting work on a second novel.