Seasons of Water, Part 3

The last of a three-part prose piece for a creek

Today, the conclusion of my contribution to Nogojiwanong’s/Peterborough’s Poetry Gardens project, which was taken down this week, around the time of our first frost. The turn is happening, is trying to happen, though the temperature just swooped back up again. The turns are multiple. The world is ailing. The work is an avalanche. In the midst, I send this brief interlude.

For this project I walked along Jackson Creek, the creek that runs through the middle of town. This final piece gets only as far as Jackson Park; there could be many more instalments. Here are the first and the second, if you feel like reading them all together, reading the full season.

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3.

Two drakes negotiate the rapids, take the bend at a clip, barely any green left on them. I’m stopped off the path, in shade, at chainlink, looking at a picnic bench under sun on the other side. No barricade, just bank, then water, the two drakes. This side, protection. That side, refuge. Which mode illicit. Two lawn-chairs under a maple tree, or a natural gasline.

Crumbled street surfaces as good as any chainlink, and the creek is orderly, escaping me, west then north, urging the trees higher, the banks steeper, rougher, water secreting through backyards and kids squealing in these last squealing days, jay-squawk abundant, all life keyed to shouldering, clambering, over any concrete obstruction, emulating water, its mode, its motion. The full green of the season teeters into yellow. Chilly mornings along the rigid avenues, private property unremitting, exhaustive, exhaustible. That we’ve thought to do this to land.

Every year, where I’m from, the industrial machinery seeds another inch of the ditches, but still there’s that fringe beside the road, precarious, forgotten at times, and so it goes here along the creek: piled-up deadfall and exposed roots, tall beings falling, construction debris, errant mulch and grass-seed, any of the much-maligned, goldenrod, grapevine, first cigarette, a place to change clothes, a last look up as the stars blink and spin and start to fall.

I follow the creek into the park and feel the civic grip relax, assume a new form. The bank low now. The dark, muffling cedars. At the water’s level, a woman kneels, speaks, dips a hand into the water.

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