Talking through the water

 

Each poet involved in AQUA4 visited at least two of the four sites, producing two poems inspired by what they saw, felt, experienced, sensed, knew, wondered, wished. Here is the text.

Oxon Run

Barrett Warner

 

And here, a fish that can’t be alive,

in the dirty martini stream

 

that doesn’t exist. Yet it does,

bending at the humeris and ulna

 

of Mississippi and Southern Aves

in Southeast Washington—city of elbows.

 

Legless swimmer, let me imagine,

you fell from storm clouds hissing in the sky,

 

traveled from the parking lot via rain sewer

in a paper cup or a Guinness can barge,

 

not fifteen downhill blocks from St. E’s

where Pound sang his cantos to sleep.

 

Chinooks from Bolling Air Force Base above,

and gray destroyers in the Navy Yard,

 

and below, geology layered by a Hand

skilled in the art of corruption,

 

so that dinosaur gravel from 60 million years ago

beds with alluvial clay from an era of live birth.

 

This rarest of rocky marriages,

the only one that produces magnolia bogs.

 

No wonder its popularity among middle schoolers

like my mother in the Fifties, preparing to be greasers,

 

or to protest policing exercises in South Vietnam,

one race pursuing happiness, but on another corner,

 

the pursuit of meaning and a hot herring

sandwich at Aunt Lucy’s is what matters.

 

Even today, as four deer gossip in the fens,

two beautiful brown boys climb the bank,

 

a little hip showing above their denim

as if they’d just been for a swim.

Kingman Island, Anacostia Watershed

Sheila McMullin

 

Invasion is what made you, 1916.

Dredging as prophet

a way to puncture what wasn’t ours,

build what never could be ours.

Feeling the air to be wide and free

a man in charge believed this gave us power we

never would have had

so we felt this made the ground

ours. Ours for commercial use then tourist attraction

then as save the last wild bit of the city.

In our names say of earth.

We were made of ground

until we believed we could make ground.

Land is us holding out cupped hands.

Valleys of mirrors for sparrows

to drink and water like

sand through our gaping hands.

No water for sparrows to drink.

I don’t know who borrowed you first,

who first turned their back

and when charged with facing you again

you were no longer you

and we were no longer us either.

I come here today to ask you how to know what I can offer?

Sitting on a quarried rock with wind and spiders

under a freeway overpass along the Anacostia River bank.

Some of us are trails stained with purple blackberries.

Trails made of cement in a grassy round-about lined with bird feeders.

Trails of bridges connecting a park entrance to the edges of the muddy

island.

Trails of laid out rotting logs and wood planks through honeysuckle and

poison ivy

overgrowth.

Trails of cars through a monarch migration path.

Trails of duck and work boot prints in newly seeded wet

lands for restoration.

Trails of cattail, reed, fiddlehead, switch grass.

Some of us our trails of bags filled with Styrofoam and plastic.

Trails of lids and straws.

Trails of land waxing with sewage unfamiliar to the roots of black haw or

the cardinal or the catfish.

Some of us are towering cranes.

We are mock-wild and want to be beautiful.

Back to our roots, a restoration, and yet you’re still here,

a land mass where there wasn’t one, an evolution.

Where The Camera Turns Its Blank Face

Rachel Carstens

 

Oxon Run runs through and under rock, water, rock, soil, cement, tree root, bridge,

signage, unlit lampposts kissing the canopy or are engulfed in long stretches of

uninterrupted blue sky.

 

Outside Covenant House, descending to the stream that feeds into the Potomac,

a photographer in knee high mucks looks downstream

speaking to the metaphoric space for names, all these layers—No entry.

 

Back-tracking through the ivy and vine up the slope and south,

over algae and rust-colored water, where not so far above,

a boy ties a younger boy’s shoe and ducks in the wake of girls’ chatter:

Hey! Someone’s down there!

 

But quickly disinterested in the shin-deep water-locked woman,

her black box and arched lens, the girls keep moving.  The sun pours over the water,

ripples like vibrato, is flattened on the panes punctuating brick and blocking out

the interior of apartments.

 

It’s summer now. The light lengthens

and every noisemaker in the aria of urban afternoon is out:

crickets legs’ rubbing, water over rock, the cracked or hole-ridden muffler

of some rust-laden and near-wrecked car,

the girls again in the distance, a family of bounding deer pass the amphitheater

in the park near the apartments of so many stacks of families,

generations in quick succession, the exhalation of the bus lowering itself,

passengers at the bus stop, and further off the train’s horn—

segregation by transportation,  imposter of daily life.