David Yezzi on Rory Waterman's 'The Lake'

The Lake by Rory Waterman

Mid-May now, and the hawthorns have started
foaming and stinking. They glow under clear night sky.
The car-park is empty, the vending hatches shut.
When I was too small to stand somebody left
a girl near here to die, unconscious, full of come,
and gagged, in case. Flopped her in the silt
with care. The moon flutters a meaningless smile
and on the surface it skits everywhere.

from New Poetries V © Rory Waterman

In the space of eight well-crafted lines, Rory Waterman's 'The Lake' takes the reader from the surface of the natural world—the surface of a lake—to the menacing undercurrent of memory below. The poem’s opening sets up an expectation of bucolic serenity—lake, May, hawthorns—then quickly dashes it with 'foaming and stinking', a foreshadowing of something rotten in this leafy scene:

Mid-May now, and the hawthorns have started
foaming and stinking. They glow under clear night sky.
The car-park is empty, the vending hatches shut.

Perhaps it is off-season or merely off-hours but the parking lot is empty and the concessions closed in this place of recreation or resort spot (maybe). Shuttered boardwalks are particularly eerie because of the missing crowds that haunt the place by their absence, like ghosts. One ghost in particular rises in the speaker's mind, the spectre of a girl raped and murdered near this spot:

When I was too small to stand somebody left
a girl near here to die, unconscious, full of come,
and gagged, in case. Flopped her in the silt
with care. The moon flutters a meaningless smile
and on the surface it skits everywhere.

Waterman sets up a disturbing tension between the small boy and the young victim and meaningless violence, echoed eerily by the meaningless 'smile' of the crescent moon. The most powerful moments in the poem for me are not the gut-punches of 'full of come' or 'gagged', though those are almost searing in intensity. It is the quiet, horrible precision of 'in case' (meaning 'in case she somehow survives') and 'with care', which conveys the cool calculation and even perhaps, and more horribly, the tender thought of a savage murderer.

The motion of the poem is cinematic and reminds me of David Lynch's shot in Blue Velvet, as it sweeps past an average front yard and a gleaming fire truck before plunging into the undergrowth to reveal (even there!) an animal violence underlying the appearance of things.

David Yezzi's latest collection of poems is Azores (Swallow Press).