Proctor Creek
That ripe sewage scent is anaerobia’s byproduct:
bacterial mouthfuls packed with saturated leaves,
slipped bark, accumulations of deer, rabbit,
bluegill & snail droppings. The dank odor strengthens
with stagnation. Beaver dams block debris all along
this tributary, snagging flotsam, litterfall,
convenience store wrappers. Upstream, last year’s bright
pasture is infested with builders; silt works its way
into the mix. Once that gleaming land was Don’s, a field
with tractors out back, willow oaks shading every June.
Now it’s a gruel of rebar, lumber, aggregate.
Creeks & fields are precious things, falling always
into the same successional cycles; pines & weeds,
sediment, warehouses or twiggy dams. The constants
careening such systems are mostly unchangeable
as is the sole urge of us animals, that need
to stop flow, fight decay. Isn’t it the inherent
nature of things to be emptied & filled again:
Don’s land, the river valleys? All trees gets chewed
into lodges or tract homes planting some codger’s
useless meadow, though these identical processes
are hardly comparable. Paddling this creek, passing
the golf course, that much is clear. Each copied day
I look on our work, snaring myself or burrowing
deep into the bone-den we make. And when the light
at last swims free of its gaps I’ll weave a woody
bed of the world and sleep on what will come of us.
Monk’s Mound Meditation
Dad sifted Cahokia’s dregs at age twelve, found coiled
shrapnel: shells crammed in soil: smooth but baring fractures,
cracks formed beneath the molars of hard decay.
In millenia gone, those conchs held deep sips
steeped in herbal sacrament. They rose to wet lips,
traces of yaupon trapped in their bicarbonate seams.
Yaupon, which grows as weeping masses in lowcountry:
by my grandmother’s house, across meted bounds of chain,
searing waters: the native source for grass-weavers,
their dugouts once lining shores like moored gators,
those people who lugged that rootstock, those leaves, from sea
to the Mississippi, to Cahokia to join
hands in drink & dance. It energized their voices,
we learned. They left residues that Dad unknowingly
brushed one June, far from Chicago’s steel temples
and not long after the just death of DDT,
that beast which clawed sky from the lungs of songbirds,
melted eggs, loitered fresh for later consumption.
Fall is approaching here. Every weekend I sweep
shattered beer bottles from the lawn. Trucks pass-by
pluming smoke to eradicate mosquitoes,
they float a stark aroma, they stink of chemical
futures, cuing moans from five-thousand wings, sticking
sacred-deep, hanging on the surface of things for years.