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.