Around the Lakes
A poetry chapbook by James Cook
All rights reserved © Beyond Words Press, Berlin, Germany
First Printing, August 2025
ISBN 978-3-948977-93-1
Cover art: Barbara Tlush, Symphony.
Barbara Tlush is a modern realist whose work draws from American Realism and the emotive nuance of Impressionism. With technical finesse and quiet sensitivity, she captures the luminosity of light and form in her subjects—often solitary animals and tranquil landscapes. Her compositions prioritize clarity over mood, yet evoke emotion through restrained brushwork and tonal depth.
Educated at Parsons School of Design and the Rhode Island School of Design, she refined her practice under American Impressionist marine painter Don Stone on Monhegan Island, Maine. Barbara also draws continued inspiration from her longstanding art conversations with close friend Helga Testorf, famously known as Andrew Wyeth’s muse.
In addition to her primary body of work, she paints a historical, whimsical winter series of iconic SnowPeople®.
First, the end of summer
Then, yes, there’s this: the backbreaking beauty of work, of lifting each night, the stars into the sky. There’s the weight of adding my dreams to the dreams of others, even when they take up too much space on the sidewalks. Until a moment ago, the sun was casting in an almost timid, early-evening sort of way, her light into my kitchen.
She’s gone to bed now and the lightbulbs are blinding. Time to lift the stars.
When I go out sometimes, I can’t see the trees and all their falling foliage because my eyes keep getting in my eyes. You know what I mean, don’t you? The way everything demands, begs, beckons to be let in and you want to throw your arms around every little thing, kiss them all and say yes, yes my love, yes so much that it all starts to blur?
Year One
Which is not to say we’re starting with my first breath. No, I want to start with the way I noticed how differently the waves kiss the sand when the lakes are smaller. And growing up in Chicago, wind off the lake was just the early-morning radio soundtrack to my life, but my cheeks have never been so dry and breeze-bitten. No,
what I mean to say is things don’t last around here. Hold on. I don’t mean like the way my fingers get so cold some days I worry they’ve somehow hollowed out in the night. What I mean is that I’m always reaching for a fistful of my own breath. What I mean is be
patient. What I mean is just watch. What I mean is that heat slips out of our oven so dinner always takes longer than the longer than you planned than usual. The heat slips out of our oven and into my bedroom so rolled up in my blankets some nights I feel like a catfish about to be steamed.
But my teeth still cling tight to my gums, so I think we’ll be okay.
At work they let me steal cards from the card catalog to paper the wall above my desk. At work the vents like to breathe heavy because they think it’s fun the way my arms bubble so quickly into gooseflesh.
When I come home some days I have to remind myself that the sun still sets when it’s supposed to. But that’s not what I wanted to say. Sometimes I hold my shoes in both palms before I put them on so they remember who I am. I’m not good at this whole mess, you know this about me. How I’d rather say it to the birds on the lake. I am a creature of many habits and I let the lakes hold my bones when I need to rest.
The sun rises earlier now
And yes, again, November, ever-hungry-biting-almost; pink-lipped mouth of winter
And yes, again, the way I sigh the same whether the breath in my ear is from the sky’s mouth or yours. How to stop the body’s heave of pleasure? But no, never the morning’s creep through my curtains, always drawn so the neighbor’s siding can watch me get dressed. The only audience to my nakedness.
But here– yes, again, the white morning light over my bed, over your still sleeping body, over the bay, over the one time this month I woke to you, lips parted mid-breath, chest rising and falling, pale like teeth.
Waves
I want so badly to be in love with the world: the way the hills in the driftless roll in great limestone waves and crash into grass berms; the scrape of a cow tongue against my wrist or the shedding flesh off a deer’s antlers.
I want to show you, dear, beauty: the way my mother wraps her arm around my shoulders, kisses my cheek with all her might at the end of a long day; the way the dahlia’s petals burst open to the sky in my neighbor’s yard and how I bend to smell them each time I pass. Dear
dear you, can I be honest for a minute? I can’t seem to sleep these days, with the way the house next door blocks the sunrise from my windows, casts empty shadows in my half-empty bed. Can I publish an addendum to a love that burned a hole right through me? Can I be honest with you for just a moment and say waking always feels like the way the waves beat against the rocks lining the shore and how I ache every day to love it?
Indulgences
Forgive me for the way I have to lick every last croissant flake from my fingertips or disturb your embrace in the morning to admire the crows in the branches outside my window.
Forgive me for stopping at the corner to take a picture of the still-risen moon; 8am, still impossibly high in the impossibly blue sky like she’s bragging about something.
Forgive me for being too caught up in the geese on the lake to notice the mouse ironed to the pavement under my feet and the treads of bike tires, running shoes imprinting what’s left of its mottled fur.
Forgive me when I need to miss the things that don’t shine: the mud soaked cloth outside the house with the lonely plastic wreath, a delivery of groceries on the stoop under a sign requesting I please wear a mask.
Forgive me for pulling the last flower from the city-planted bed at the crosswalk, her red petals were starting to brown from the cold and she had already held on for so long.
And forgive me for, when I finally got to work, pocketing
the index card for the French Dictionnaire des mots rare et precieux, and then not daring to use the back to write this poem.
Bookends
Some mornings, I watch the sun crest over the horizon on the lake–the little one with a bay carved off by the heavy berm of the train tracks. The cranes perch in the lakeweed to watch the blue light of the morning. Together in silence, we turn our beaks to the sky.
And some evenings, I sit and listen to the neighborhood settle into the almostquiet of night in the city, punctuated only by the sounds of migration above, and I can’t see the sunset because the little four-squares across the street block its path down the sky.
Somedays, I get to see the world at its bookends.
which makes it hurt a little less to remember the cranes and the way their wings skim the the top of the lake like the kiss you gave me the last time you called me yours, but that’s not really true and the way the water flicks up onto their backs when their wings brush the surface. Like your fingers on my cheek telling me it’s too messy.
My love, I don’t like to overwrite myself. And you know this because you
know I’ve never told you that loving you feels like the way I want to break things sometimes.
Like the way I want
to go blind in one eye
those mornings sitting by the lake which kisses my shoes more tenderly than you’ve ever kissed me but still hold me, your stubble rubbing red my neck before parting every night.
Today I was late for the cranes, who had waited for me in the full-morning sun. They forgave my tardiness when they saw the beard burn, the shadows under my eyes and they told me there is a way to all this, dear little love, and we will find it, they promise, in the crashing of the waves on the shore, in the beating of wings on the breeze.
Everything/makes me mildly or more/hungry
After Ross Gay
I.
My legs open like a hinge; which is like a crack finally; in a thing always made
not to break, merely give under the right pressure: the push of fingertips into thighs like a Sunday roast, lamb so tender it falls off the bone
like the way your lips pull flesh from muscle: the unnecessary determination of a creature deprived only now, finally, presented with a meal.
II.
Second child. Youngest child, and I swore to never again let a man eat me after my brother decided to teach me a lesson about sharing and ownership by biting imprints into my knuckles over stolen popcorn, chocolates. Never again a meal.
III.
A meal of what, exactly, do these bones have to offer? You refused one night, to take my fingers into your mouth, nailbeds
too jagged and bitten down from my own mealmaking but later, still grabbed me around the waist, held me to the bed and sucked bruises into the curve of my abdomen below my ribs, told me how sweet I moan as I tried to get away because being devoured felt too good.
IV.
And grabbing feels good until one remembers how often grabbing becomes tearing because kneading always means ripping. Your hand around my neck like breaking apart dough and you like the sound my throat makes when my larynx threatens to give under your fingertips and I like it too so for now let’s just forget the tearing.
V.
I want to eat the absence inside you; a child eating cotton candy, not to feel full, just to feel the way the sugar melts on the tongue, to trickle down the throat.
Up North
Let’s go up North. I mean Way North. I mean to a place where the wind doesn’t just bite at our cheeks but gnaws, with inch-long fangs, our faces to streaky red.
Let’s go so far North the fish freeze and we can walk across the water to see their little eyes frozen, to stare all winter up at the sky (and our boots, and the skates of fishermen) in what I want to imagine is some kind of prayer. Let’s go
so far up North the trees groan in a dialect too foreign for the trees on our street to understand. So far North the language changes. I want to go so we can hear the rattle of the window panes when the sky sends great buffets of snow to try to hold them in place. Let’s go, my love, to a place
so far up in the cold that the only places we can find to keep our noses from turning into cherries are the crooks of each other’s elbows, the bend of each other’s knees.
Let’s go somewhere so far North that the silence of the wet and white-downed world is only broken by the clouds of whispers between our lips.
To the little bird on the side of the road
I guess I thought hatching season was over, little thing, not even the size of my palm, head turned to the side, looking at least, at the flowerbed overflowing, at least, with mid-summer carnations. Chest still full of ribs, the small comfort that you haven’t yet been flattened by passing cars, or my feet, which, if I hadn’t done a midstreet dance, would have crushed you.
And here in this wild Green, so endless you’d call it merciless if it wasn’t for the way the vines stretch like hands– seem to beg to cradle you in their rain-dampened embrace, and the way you want so badly to fall into the cushions of their wet palms. The petrichorous smell that promises a return to something primordial, something that reaches almost into you, almost through you to find that longing which holds the promise of falling forever through green through dirt through earth into a place that is only this: so human and at once so alien.
And September, time for what
colors: the not-yet-red brown of leaves fallen too soon, no longer June-gold sunrises but the biting promise of blue gray cloud cover sunsets such violences of pink and purple. The slow turning of an almost-ripe apple fallen early from the infant tree, rustling of the first-and-last crows of the migration. The endless drip-drop of indecisive rain through the window. Here comes the turning: smell it in the air as the sun starts to dip earlier and earlier down the sky.
Just another
Something died here on this stretch of highway I wish I could call lonely so the poor creature now a smear of blood and viscera ground so far into the pavement it no longer resembles anything ever alive could have some semblance of peace. Instead the tires roar on over and over again its mash, commuting to and from the city where maybe the raccoon or deer or possum maybe saw, maybe once, the lights of the capitol dome crest and maybe thought it was something like the moon rising as it did hours ago now, though the matte gray of the clouded –or maybe smogged over, or maybe it’s just the smell of winter closing in–sky hides its light.
Maybe his eyes still see from somewhere between the pebbles in the asphalt, I hope as I’ve been past him now for some time, on my way to somewhere else, which hate to admit is to buy groceries.
Sunblind
Because, with all the winter, there is nowhere else to look but directly into the sun; reflected in every–direction off the snow, windshields of passing cars, eye of fellow pedestrians, lumbering through this middle of February, though all of February is the middle of February, how it sinks its claws so deeply into the earth, you have to imagine bloody nailbeds, like the way mine are worn down now after so much of this shortest month. Torn and jagged as icicles off roofs, which, back home, would demand Caution-Falling Ice signs on busy sidewalks, lest February lose a tooth into yet another skull. Here only a few buildings tall enough to risk accidental mastication. Just too many ruts carved into the snow, tell tale signs of falls or almostfalls, the least interesting of all the winter head traumas.
The bumble
His wings didn’t move when I lifted him, pinched his tiny form between my fingers. My hands just short of shaking from the cold, I managed to scoop without crushing, his little body into my palm. I held him while we walked, shielded him from the biting wind. I stopped every few feet, tried to breathe, with as much as my body would produce in the face of the early autumn chill warmth into him. He didn’t move in our block and a half together, and I wondered now how many bees (despite what you hear) really hibernate spontaneously. We stopped near some hostas, the bed dotted with the last desperate blooms of zinnias, black eyed susans, and I let him tumble down a leaf under the foliage.
Do I tell myself he woke up? That in the cradle of hosta and zinnia, he found enough warmth to flicker open his wings and lift himself out, find his way home to his nest? It’s better I suppose than wondering exactly what it looks like when a bee decays in frost and dirt.
This
morning, like every morning
I could tell you I love you, and list the multitude of things that make that true, your eye-shine like fresh cut aquamarine (my birthstone), the sandy ruffle of your hair after your shower, or how you must perfectly flatten the top of every pint of ice cream between servings. But I’d rather tell you about how, this morning, (when I was sitting on the dock where I sit every morning, where my thoughts inevitably bob along with the ducks to your grin when your hands dance across the keys of your piano, or, on hazy mornings-not-this-one, my back) I want to tell you that today, I wanted to pull the sky from the sky and wear it like a shirt. And instead
of telling you how something in me quivers on those same hazy mornings when I wake to my pillow covering all of your face but your lips like thrushs’ breasts, I’ll tell you that this morning, the capitol peaked over the trees to watch me run and it felt like falling into soft grass and the tickle of its fresh cut fingers. I won’t say I like Ginsberg now because of you or that I’ve never allowed anyone else to force
air from my monkey cheeks. I won’t even tell them what I mean by monkey cheeks. Just let me tell you
one more time how the sun parts the clouds like your fingers on piano keys.
Our work
And crawling, and crawling, toward something, toward arms, towards arms that promise, promise something, something love, something necessary, something unspoken and then–
And then the quiet, and then the waiting, the lingering.
Alone in a place where nothing warm, no summer sun on the waves lapping the shore like feet hitting the pavement to get somewhere closer.
Not watching the family of ducks resting on the rocks and the children being told not to give them the bread from their ham and cheese sandwiches.
Not the wondering who, these days, eats ham and cheese sandwiches.
But the heart pounding in your throat and the realization it must be your own.
You aren’t alone here on these rocks, though the rocks will try to convince you otherwise. My friend, the waiting. The waiting is what we do.
We who watch the rosebuds until the petals fall away.
We eat the hearts in our throats because swallowing them is the only way.
To not drown in our own blood. Dramatic, I know, but this is what we get for standing on the stone breakwaters while the geese fly overhead. We try not to get shit on.
Geese don’t shit in flight, a helpful voice supplies, and while this may be true, it doesn’t move our feet from sandstone.
We are bound here by the waiting.
We have no arms, only reaching. The sun is touching the horizon.
I’m ready for the lakes to be lakes again, which isn’t to say I haven’t indulged in the adrenaline rush of a sneakered-step onto their icy faces, listened through my heartbeat for the metallic ping of the underlayers breaking; but I’m longing once again to plunge my small, all too human body into sun-warm water, sink down to greet the fish now still suspended, waiting for me to join them.
The sun is rising
And I crest the hill and there she is: the goldening maple, ever tender guardian rooted above this park, her kingdom, the lake (and just next to the bathrooms). Those feet which cling without effort into the earth have many times now stretched my sore and aching calves, her shade offered a brief reprieve from the sun which, this summer made me–made everyone–forget how to be cold. The wind is blowing the lake to tumult. The ducks are doing their best to avoid being crashed against the rocks which delineate the carved water from the manicured grass. She has her arms thrown open to the world, the finally cold-again wind and I, panting, and laughing, throw open my arms beside her.
The crow and the goose are having a conversation
And god, it’s early. I didn’t remember what 7am felt like when you didn’t mean it:
The sheer cacophony of the morning the squirrels like rambunctious children in the trees drop twigs and acorns which wakes, inevitably, the geese who scream from the lake for the children to get off their lawn, which in turn wakes and upsets the crows, who just want everyone to be quiet because the sun has only just risen.
Year Two
And my bones creak louder now, which must be the year burying into them. Or maybe they’re finally cooked. There’s no moving anymore. My shoulders carry in them an itch always in need of scratching.
And since now, I’ve seen many dalliances of cardinals in the trees when I walk to my new job. This walk is shorter, there is more life waiting around the edges.
I make longer things now. I make with my fingers the way it feels to hold
the palm of the man I love and caress the inner bends of his knuckles. Each one in turn. I make callus almost like I’ve only seen cracked and molded over the beds of my father’s palms. Do the geese sing for their fathers? I want to feed them
my hair so maybe they will tell me. What is the cost of knowing? What is the currency? Can you know someone by making them coffee every day and how long? This is knowing you say when each day you set the cup somewhere you know I’ll see it and thank you, though you’re already gone by the time I do.
I don’t know where to put myself anymore.
Do you?
And who to ask? Where will we go when we’ve decided? I understand better now. I know the wind bites not with malice but reminders that we know better. My bones know better, they remind me with deep pops and groans when I wash my shoulders. They know better, they remind me, and bring me now to the lakes with them.
The first thaw
And what quiet now, the rushing of air through the air plane of ice stretching on endless until it reaches the other side of the bay. Lay down on the thawing concrete and look above and above and above so much sky it’s blinding. Let it swallow you. Let the blue take the breath from your lungs and gasp until you find again yourself lying, chest bared to the sky begging for what you don’t know but something only the quiet of its infinity can offer. Ask the gaping blue maw what you should do when you rise again
God is a Betting Man
Hello you say and pat down the newly handwashed crocheted blanket on the seat where he sat when you last spoke. I’ll give you a nickel–He begins to say but you beat him to the punch, gesture to the appletini already poised, green and dripping with condensation on the end table beside the leather armchair–
Pony up and you take your own seat, hand extended. You’ve never seen Him grin but when he does, teeth white as the way the sun flashes behind your eyelids when you stare too long, you know he remembers. You never thought God would remember you. He flicks the slightly-folded corner of the blanket and lowers himself down. His fingers, worn with impossible age, wrap around the stem of the glass and he raises it past beard and bushy mustache to his lips. My child there’s a warmth to his tone you forgot from last time, when it was reserved only for the dalmatian and the afghan hound. You raise your own glass to your lips. Did you see–I knew from the first minute–The form, the patterns on the coat–You smirk again and hold out your hand–Pony up.
One last kiss
And the quiet, god, the quiet and the sky so impossibly far away in the sky
How to touch it? The clouds striated in shades of gray and light-pollution orange. What to say to a sky like that? How to tell it I love it in a way I’ve never loved even the men who have touched me in ways that have pulled the words from my lips like milk, silken words my tongue forms so naturally around like the way I take them in my throat (sorry, mom, and sorry for the time, convinced I was dying, you watched a nurse push a swab for a strep test down my throat, reassured me everyone gags, so don’t be embarrassed, and then I didn’t and all we could say was Well.) I never
want to promise myself to anyone the way I want to promise myself to the sky when the last inches of gold linger along the horizon, unwilling to say goodnight, goodbye. Unwilling to leave, just yet, not without one last kiss.
Desert Oysters
I speak to my mother over the phone on a night that really is like any other night: cars drive past too loudly out the open windows–through which early-autumn winds blow stilltoo-warm air into the small apartment in which I'm learning how to be alone–about things that matter, and that don't; argue over whether an octopus would willingly eat us (it would, if given half a chance); share too much when I describe to her the conversation I ended just before with the man I would give anything to be loved by, but have been now (again) reminded not to. An ambulance wails by as she admits she used to dream about dropping my brother and I on the stoop of our elementary school, getting on I-90 and just driving. I look at the dog asleep on the couch beside me, hear the voice of my beloved telling me he doesn't want to hear about me fucking anyone else, despite his choice to no longer be my beloved, eye the corner of the living room that will never no matter what I tell myself be dusted and I'm transported to the dream of a diner in the middle of the desert alone.
I don't know how I got here or where I am going but the road
stretches out beyond the boundaries of the neon sign's retro glow and the coffee in my hand is lukewarm and too thin like in a place like this it always is, should be. I try not to remember the train ride on which he and I, trapped in the station and the vacational absence of our respective at-the-time boyfriends, so many years ago, ate mediocre sandwiches and drank too-Gay-for-Raton-New-Mexico lattes in a small diner nothing like this desert of my imagination. My mother is talking about oysters. Why would I worry about the freshness of oysters in the desert? Desert oysters. Gentle glow of a diner out of time. Lingering Warmth of beloveds who will always be beloved. The dog snores on the couch, kicks my foot to remind me that the dawning end of summer is no time to be lost in the desert. I pet his head, look at the dishes left behind by my best friends–the only people lovingly unimpressed by my cooking. The couch is warm with their imprints, the dog settles back into his impatient slumber, silently begs me to bed. The wind rustles the almost-bare branches. My mother bids me goodnight. A car screeches down the road. I bury myself In a poem. Later I dream about working the line in a diner on the coast, shucking the freshest of desert oysters.
The leaves have mostly fallen
And now, again, November, and forgive me for taking so long to get here. When I tried to dress for the occasion, nothing fit even though it did. This body of mine in the mirror–I suppose, anyway, it must be–seems to change with the seasons. Summer’s flush which rounded my cheeks slides, glacial, away now, the rose drawn specifically to hold fast to the taper of my waist holds tighter not by the thorns but the leaves which cling more insistently around my waist. What I mean to say is
I'm here now. I can feel you trying to reach me, your cold fingers creeping from the lake helped along by the wind. I am waiting for the earth to split open and those hands to come crawling out, sink their claws again into this still-though-barely-green earth. Did I tell you, November, that I got a dog? He's the color of an angel with a face that smiles like a freshly baked pastry. We live alone together. He is waiting with me now. Your cranes, too, sit here on the rocks where we always have sat together. They don't remark on the lack of beardburn around my neck, simply tell me they like my new tattoos, and ask for the latest land gossip. I have spent
two years getting my feet under me. I am ready for the earth to split open again: now I know where to stand. Now I walk on the rocks
beside the breaking waves and know exactly where my lake wants me to step.
In conclusion, year four, end of summer
What greater delight than end-of-summer raspberries plucked sneakily from a stranger’s yard while walking the dog?
And the smells of a rich tomato sauce from a kitchen surely set to spend the next few hours bubbling away perhaps for an anniversary or a birthday or just an everyday act of devotion
Ripening pumpkins on front lawns surrounded by the first fallen leaves off the trees most ready for a nap their apples cradled lovingly in netting to protect from squirrels and gravity.
I no longer wish to go blind in one eye just to give form to the hollowness. Yes.
Summer is ending, but this year I’m ready to be cold again, to take November into my arms.
