On a turf trail to the short, hilly route to Rush Lake
by Hawk Hollow, then a village with a kindred name
to a starry, bright green pear with a rusty stem—
insofar as a pear could bear any semblance to a hawk
or a hollow close to Bartlett, where the train runs through—
yes, that’s the name, Bartlett. And it wasn’t the pear
named for a hawk after all, so the story goes, my dear.
And you know, it wasn’t a Barlett pear in the beginning,
but a Williams pear. No one recognized how the two pears
were one species until much later. The original name
was The Good Christian, after a man called to a king’s deathbed
cultivated the first seed of a pear tree for his garden.
We go to the hidden lake over the bridge by Round Meadow,
but too far south on foot, so we drive a little further
where the fishermen cast lines for northern pike, walleye,
muskie, perch. By the sand pond off Butterfield Road,
there’s largemouth bass, small bluegill, channel catfish,
green sunfish, grass carp, and sunfish again—
only a moderate walk on a gravel trail around Rice Lake,
then the lake named after May or maybe a girl
if you say it all in one breath, mayslake. In this meadow,
there more than enough water for the songbird slough
off Mill Road, and a shallow marsh of thin, singing reeds,
and clearwater where the fish cribs spawn their young
in a spring creek reservoir by a deep quarry lake.
Grateful, I murmur to the Creator and my beloved—
I love dwelling among lakes where a girl’s name
may slake the thirst of our climate migrants. I’ll never
take a pear, a lake, or a perch for granted.
—
Karen An-hwei Lee’s recent poetry collections are The Beautiful Immunity (Tupelo Press 2024), Duress (Cascade 2022), and Rose is a Verb: Neo-Georgics (Slant 2021). She lives in greater Chicago.
