Lake Studies: Meditations on Lake Champlain
Lake Champlain Maritime Museum, 2011
The poems in this collection are works of imagination that incorporate the poet’s knowledge of what archeologists and other scientists and researchers have learned of the underwater mysteries of the lake, its human and natural history and native lore.
Imagery and song are fundamental to these poems, with persistent undertones of folklore and religion among Daniel’s imaginative characterizations of the lake and its myths, creatures and people. Includes underwater photography by Pierre LaRocque and images of the skeletal remains of the earth’s oldest creatures, visible today in the priceless “marble” of the islands’ Chazy Reef.
This book may be purchased at the Lake Champlain Maritime Museum and at selected outlets in Vermont.
The Inland Sea: Reflections Audiobook
A selection of poems on CD from “Lake Studies,” read by the author.
Review of Daniel’s Lake Studies in Seven Days
Selected Poems From Lake Studies
Nocturne
When we go below,
we almost expect to see the stars,
mirrored by the surface so vividly at night,
fixed in their places along the bottom.
The big fish—the elegant pike,
avuncular channel cat,
the lordly muskellunge—they graze
the hillsides around and below us like cattle.
The little fish—shiners in a school,
tessellated darters scattering
like grace notes on a score so the silence
appears to have secret music,
appears even to have birds.
Are there seasons here?
Or only overhead, as in dreams?
Like storm clouds, the hulls of boats.
An occasional swimmer in flight.
Are dusk and dawn the same?
There are no pedestrians,
no panhandlers, no streetlights.
No distant porchlight but the moon.
Small boats, moored along the bottom,
appear homesick to those of us
who love our homes. We listen
for fishcalls, as if a pumpkinseed
were a flugelhorn. But these corridors
of mud are silent as catacombs.
Story
—“Frozen mammoths have frozen buttercups
between their teeth.” Bill Streever, Cold
After long sleep, after the poultice
of winter—salvation,
like the birth of an eon.
How the rare shrug of the glacier
--the report—exploding between brows
of the valley as if the very dawn
came up like thunder
must have caused loss of hearing
in any number of bovids,
deprived crows and ravens
of their songs.
What of the people, camped in its shade?
Who were the wise among them
who could read the ice,
tell frazil from shish?
Surely the bark of their boats
had the power to speak.
Whisht! Listen.
We stood on the shore, as if at the doorway
to a house no longer standing.
Made our spears and atlatls ready.
Then the hair and the horned
came down to drink and we talked to them.
This is said to have happened.