Seasons of Water, Part 2
The second in a three-part prose piece for Jackson Creek
Below is part two of my contribution to the Poetry Gardens project here where I live in Nogojiwanong/Peterborough. Following a hard walk along the most polluted expanse of Jackson Creek, we begin at the Charlotte Mews, standing above an uncovered stretch of water, and we conclude just north of the downtown and a large piece of flood-mitigation infrastructure, where the sound of vehicle traffic recedes at times and you can really hear the creek do its thing.
The piece below hung out on Hunter Street across from the Red Dog for a month, in a bed of coneflower and grasses I don’t know the names of. And now it’s hanging out here, with you.
2.
Mews-encircled, emerging to flow under clock tower, flagpole, rebar cross, nearby artwork of clear blue curving down from green hills. Copper it flows, in daylight, in a year with rain. Grey haze above. Boreal. The question of whether city and water can co-exist. Settler and forest. Can I truly make home here. Burning biome of memory. A skepticism lives in me, alongside banks of our making, furring water, what it reflects, a cardboard box covered in duct tape, rainbows of oil sliding down parking-lot grates. Cut-throughs, alley views, water as aural backdrop for functioning / ailing / much-maligned downtown core, and water as water-feature with ability to overtake—was it up to the knees? was it higher?—moving through this blip of existence at the end of rapids we’re still trying to control. From above, from above and looking down again, the chain-link, the fencing, blue railings and rusted iron, separation the best, the only idea—we keep making garbage, it keeps falling in—but just a short bit north, past the carwash, past the auto shops, there’s a path to it, a tent, a tarp, a way to be beside it, the babble in its fullness, chicory in flower, broken maple, feral apple, honeysuckle, tall, tall willow-splay. Just off the parking lot our approach changes, calms, bikes along the bike path, overflow apparatus—we want to stay, we want our property—cicadas in the dead centre of a season, the creek meandering away and back again, it’s rightful swerves, picking up speed, one-way streets, Trans-Canada, the water’s healing sound just across the thoroughfare, behind secreted chokecherry, dogwood. Graffiti wilding, winding. WERD WERD WERD, it says. Make Art, it says. Behind the living trees, the water scours the rock.
Laurie, this watery way you have brought before me reminded me with a bit of a jolt of my visit more than a decade ago to the Turkish town Iznik (Nicaea in Byzantium). I was there precisely to visit the site of the 4th century First Ecumenical Council of the Christian Church, summoned suasively by Byzantine Emperor Constantine - I'm sure you will remember :-) ...Nothing remains of the church in which it was held, although there are remnants of a later one. However there is much evidence of the ruins, the rubble, left by furious ethnic cleansing of the Greek minority at the hands of the Turkish nationalist forces in August 1920 (and vice versa in other parts of the Balkans). My point being that, on the grounds of a museum, I almost tumbled into a weed-clogged stagnant pool of water that had once been (according to the Museum guide) a sacred spring of agiasma,, water that was holy to both pagan and Christian worshippers. The once free-flow of sweet underground water cleansing the face and hands of those who paused there for refreshment physical and spiritual was now reduced to a sludgy trickle, while a grate that had been helpfully installed to trap rubbish hadn't been cleared in what appeared to be ages. (Meanwhile in Turkish-minority towns in mainland Greece, Greek nationalists heroically reduced hamams [public bathhouses] to similarly undistinguished rubble....But I'm glad that you were able finally to exult in your creek;s " babble in its fullness, chicory in flower, broken maple, feral apple, honeysuckle,..."