Live Encounters Poetry & Writing April 2024.
Letting the Lake House Go, poems by LaWanda Walters.
Letting the Lake House Go
In E.B White’s essay, he tries to explain—
to himself and to us—the shock he knew
on returning, and not returning, to the lake he knew as a boy,
a place he describes as his “favorite haunt.”
From the point-of-view of my friend’s artwork,
we are looking back at the pier and the house.
We are flimsy as White’s ghost, poised out here
in the middle of a lake, able to keep nothing.
And the white pier tripping out to us glitters,
which is why, at first, instead of the pier
I saw a reflection of light in the water.
I saw the broken-up waves of sunlight—
the dabs and jabs of cobalt blue
and titanium white, chrome yellow and viridian
that give light the substance of ripples,
of water moving in the sun. And then thought, No,
this was their pier, made of pine and tar.
Someone must have gone out in a boat
to take the photograph from this angle.
When things are over, they’re a story,
no longer the foam and sweetness of in medias res.
It is helpful to try to write or paint that loss,
like this house which will echo out to the lake
in different keys and voices, a clink of ice
in glasses again, the sound of other children splashing.
And so my friend, a painter, drew this house reflected
in the water, or this house with a long, wooden pier,
or this refraction of light on water.
She used pastels, which lie freely as dust
on the paper, so it must be framed
under glass to stay, and must stay, now,
the art that the wake of a boat has left.
I think my friend, who had to give the house up,
saw that yes and no, that coming and going,
that exclusive-looking pier like the arm
of the lady in the lake handing over the sword,
needed to show how life looks, how
it continually fools the eye.
Cat, Goldfish, Water
Gold Stars on a Mozart Minuet
Searching FlightAware for my daughter’s
arrival from Vienna, I see the yellow planes
clumped helter-skelter together on the screen,
like the sticky, gold-foil stars Mama used to place
on the sheet music where a child had made good
progress. She knew the meaning of reward over
punishment, having been an adopted, lame child
in dirt-poor Mississippi. Her daddy was the kinder
one, giving her three Shetland ponies and an accordion
when they could not afford it. Her “mother” disapproved,
the thin kind of lady who was such a good Christian
she’d taken Mama in. But the man she called Daddy loved
and watched out for her. We get our mothering wherever
we can find it. And just today, when my daughter arrives
from the country where Mozart ended up in an unmarked grave,
I know how close we are all to it—the people saying never
to children whose faces reflect their terror at what is alien,
no mothers for you, but here’s a blanket of aluminum.
© LaWanda Walters
LaWanda Walters earned her M.F.A. from Indiana University, where she won the Academy of American Poets Prize. Her first book of poems, Light Is the Odalisque, was published in 2016 by Press 53 in its Silver Concho Poetry Series. Her poems have appeared in Poetry, Georgia Review, Nine Mile, Radar Poetry, Antioch Review, Cincinnati Review, Ploughshares, Shenandoah, The American Journal of Poetry, Laurel Review, North American Review, Southern Poetry Review, Alligator Juniper, and several anthologies, including Best American Poetry 2015, Obsession: Sestinas in the Twenty-First Century, and I Wanna Be Loved by You: Poems on Marilyn Monroe. She received an Ohio Arts Council Individual Excellence Award in 2020. She lives in Cincinnati with her husband, poet John Philip Drury.