Seasons of Water

The first in a three-part prose piece for Jackson Creek

I’m pleased to be part of the Poetry Gardens project here where I live in Nogojiwanong/Peterborough, for it has given me the chance to follow one of the creeks that weave through town. I picked the one that gets all the attention—as a still-pretty-new resident of this place, I knew Jackson Creek was going to teach me some crucial things about where I live. It’s a creek that flows in a myriad of relations to the human-built forms that surround it, that try to shape it: downtown, underground, daylighted, residential, of the park, trail neighbour. I started where it ends, where it drains into Little Lake, the lake the city long ago made of Odoonabii-ziibi/the Otonabee River, where the creek is suffering from its relationship with us perhaps the most palpably.

The piece you’ll read spent some time on Hunter Street, close to where Jackson Creek runs under the gas station, resurfaces beside The Only Cafe, then is sent underneath the parkade. The piece spent a month in a container garden of rye grass and compass plant, edging a mural painted on the street, depicting and honouring Odoonabii-ziibi.

Below is part one, from creek mouth to the approach to downtown. Stay tuned in the coming weeks for the next instalments, as well as a bit of news about a new small book of poems soon to make its way into the world.

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1.

From above, the eye can discern which way the creek is flowing. Arriving at its mouth, at its level as the rain clouds add to it, hauling my limited perception, transplant sheathed in nylon, of a landlocked place, wildfire-minded, the creek looks stilled, all this netted scum, maple flowers, leaf debris, a haphazard boom, its use complete but still collecting, water bottle, water bottle, till the end of time water bottle, milk carton, flip-flop, football, couch cushion, wooden pallet, and the creek appears stilled, stopped by all this, become this, the Timmies and the takeout, as geese feed in marina weeds nearby, the creek refusing to deliver this baggage to the river, exercising its ethic, but this is a trick of the eye, the sum of our remediation, only from above can you see what can overtake the constructed banks, Virginia creeper and wild grape, water bottle, sharp smell of gasoline, toxicity of bus barn, sedum in flower, all community springs into being beside water, refuge and sustenance, smoke break, fishing rod, bedded down, it’s in life’s nature to flow toward the beating heart, neighbourhood of tents, at the water’s level surviving together, the law urging toward separation, stay away, look down on the creek from above, from this quaint overlook, this vantage point, the willow’s limbs canopied just so in the rain, really coming down now, like a painting, happy-face graffiti on the bridge, to hear water join with water while standing on a sidewalk is medicine, the sprawling, splintering willows sheltering, willows for ceilings and walls, and all the green down there, healing and filtering, knowing its role so much better than I do.