Undercurrent Read online

  There is still a long way to go in my journey with water, which is also a journey of becoming worthy to live as a guest on these sacred lands of the Coast Salish peoples, but that day taught me the power of what can be accomplished together. Not much in my Albertan education prepared me for that moment of sheer love for the land, waters and life, but luckily, something deeper within, both younger and older at once, recognized the gift of that moment. Immense gratitude to the Tsleil-Waututh Sacred Trust for their generous and courageous leadership.

  Gratitude also to Makhabn, known as the Bow River, whose waters kept me alive the first twenty years of my life, & who taught me the power of water from an early age, as it steadily flowed through the City of Calgary where I grew up. That river is what prepared me to love this inlet, other rivers, the ocean.

  night gift

  make space and let the night speak through you—what will the darkness say?

  will it sigh the song of night-cleaners, the lament of the wrongly imprisoned, the rage of the ragged, the dispossessed? how will the night take you back? will you be the vessel for earth shatter, hydro poison, ancestral revenge? perhaps steady weeds, growing irrepressibly into the cracks, urban repurposing, straddling both the drugs that kill & the ones that heal? the globe moves around the sun, unstoppable, feeding pine trees & the petro-state alike, giving us the days and nights by which to stand with the trees, what the oil industry calls overburden, or to die more rapidly, more stupidly, by peak oil. as rivers & oceans fill with carcinogenic wastes from the petroleum-plastic supply chain, the political systems follow, stuffed full of suncorpse & tired old neocolonial ego that refuses to stop growing until it reaches the limits of the planet’s patience. who knows what alliances & monkey wrenches will be enough to stop the greed of the greasy machine? what i do know is the humble migrants who’ve travelled the ocean have felt its wisdom more deeply than an arrogant elite that doesn’t heed the world’s necessary stories. jail the stories & the storytellers, but they will keep speaking the night, until empire expires, with or without the multitudes alive. in this race may we be ready to move fast, yet steady enough to encompass musicians & lake gatherings, forests & guerrilla gardens, fuelled by a love more immense than the injustices we’ve inherited. we need to live the world that is possible even while we struggle through war. respect living coasts & fluid watersheds, not murderous imperial borders. in grief & in celebration, in fear & in courage, in anger & in compassion, the night replenishes us so that we may continue to embody her songs.

  too long a sacrifice can make a toxin of the earth.

  o when may it suffice?

  一

  we burn ancient sunlight & petrified ancestors

  like there’s no tomorrow

  dig & draw up dirt so relentlessly we tip toward stranglehold

  does capitalism’s “progress” induce collapse?

  ed said, “everything’s been touched by oil”

  i look through plastic glasses caught under

  petroleum by-product lenses

  first unwitting then unwilling recipient of

  profit-seeking pillage sickening scale

  stunned with eerie disquiet escalating horror pulses

  carcinogens every which way

  brutal menace monstrous crime scene

  poison & violence leaking

  into the Athabasca river to the fast-melting Arctic

  systemic amnesia operates on the earth’s forest green skin

  cuts out life with detached, sociopathic precision,

  overburdens pines & birches

  dead ducks, canaries in the coal mine, turgid trout,

  delusional destruction spreads out

  explosive & erosive, manufactured discontent digs for

  more, more, more

  mammoth gashes extracted till abandoned

  like so many arrogant american swimming pools in the desert

  or chinese dams big enough to make the planet tremble for days

  imperial delirium’s race to the bottom

  at the expense of the watchers

  an expanse of hidden relations disregarded for distraction,

  an immature culture pumped

  on blunt ambition, hydrocarbon hubris,

  such malignant pustules to be

  shrugged off by intensifying storms & quakes

  banal tyranny, drunk-on-god trick, devastating heists from

  the banks of the river scarring the earth

  scaring the unborn who hover, wondering what meets them

  二

  upon seeing her capture reflected within burtynsky’s photos,

  the hostage of the petro-state

  renders a diagnosis of stockholm syndrome, self-administers

  the necessary remedies

  so terribly simple, so utterly unachieved so far:

  to kick the oil addiction for love of water

  to inhabit the earth with the dignity owed to life-giving dirt

  to fulfill our responsibilities chthonic & cosmic

  to make a story large enough, generous enough to become

  better neighbours

  with the winged, the finned, the four-legged, the stumbling

  two-leggeds

  another world is not only possible, she is already here, carrying

  on underneath our feet

  reconstituting us with each new sip of ancient water

  reassembling us into the sacred headwater’s continuum

  so we can aspire to a wiser, wider story, felt in the elders’

  strong, calm hands raised in Iskut,

  Klabona Keepers hold our fate in the courage to say enough

  witness this ghastly corporate moment striving to mature into

  great return

  a blessed unrest like three-thousand-year-old rice paddies

  mirroring our stars back to us

  reminding us to live within the budget of what the sun

  abundantly provides each day

  meridians align to rebalance what’s vital,

  downstream living bodies

  countless geese flocking overhead, wind-swayed cottonwood,

  magical caribou, garrulous groundhogs, handcuffed

  grannies, plentiful plankton, playful nieces, spawning

  salmon, song-rich mothers, mountain goats, resolute

  swanning, steady sheep, eagle soar, autonomous aunties,

  hemlock, wolf howl, venerable moose, grizzly bears, swift

  horses, nimble nephews, humble fathers, blessed cedar,

  spawning char, steady swimmers, storytellers, rivers

  devotedly rising from the unceded earth against systems of mass

  destruction

  committing to the union of the living

  a current of spacious canoes propelling renewal with each

  stroke

  a murmuration of ancestors and descendants soaring forth

  where the poison is found, look for the cure nearby,

  honouring sacred debts all the time

  how do we give back more than we have taken?

  what better gifts can we offer?

  kindred spirit, autonomous water remembers

  forest before rubble

  revives the forest after the terror is reined in

  a magical dictionary from bitumen to sunlight

  cadence : the sound of one material meeting another, hello!

  : heartbeat, disrupted & adapting

  : tree percussion, funky fir cavitation

  crushed : pressing so hard as to lose one’s own shape

  : tiny privatized homes the size of skulls or microchips relying on rare earth across continents

  : what capitalism has executed upon forests />
  ancestors : holding my body up through cellular memory, anonymous

  : condensed over eons into mineral wealth

  : material in the headlights, reconfigured as a vintage car more retro than we know, heavy metals millennia old

  carries : one act of the written word

  : a sapling song courtesy of xylem, transpires to proliferate in the ether

  ceremony : shaping one’s gestures to honour what has not been lost, just buried

  : the music that we forget is music

  mercurial : a host of premonitions, close to the source

  : the sound of fire in the sky

  micro : a power we don’t have words for

  : the burgess shale in your eyelashes

  bitumen : buried ancestors, unearthed & burned to expand the ocean

  : pitched sacrifice zone wherever it bubbles up, hellishly excavated

  sunlight : in orchestra with monthly pull, nocturnal howl

  : beaming in the future, a planetary revolution, a graced turning

  祖先

  remembering the future

  a circular muscle, tubular imperative, propels internal concoctions

  a transit from warm inner mulch to outer lucency burbles

  as traffic empties its gasoline chambers into the atmosphere

  expanding into gas eight times its liquid weight

  mutual promise unmet though embedded within our compromised states

  daily peristalsis regular & rhythmic

  rates of flow through my riverbank body

  every highway putting out the fire with gasoline

  volatility standards lowered in a race to the bought-out

  hedging bets in the midst of a photochemical frenzy

  the bottom line, the one on which we all traverse, is as free

  as the quiet air you breathe

  horse & sail more prescient than passé

  in an abundance of sun, wind, absorbent, acidifying, expanding ocean

  skeletal starfish quiver, melt & pulse scrotal with emissions

  many-chambered hearts, one-chambered sky

  behold a dizzying ballad of reckless express

  until quiet & beauty return to the land

  immersed in chlorinated water

  immersed in formaldehyde off-gas

  immersed in car exhaust

  immersed in the oxygen produced by oceanic plankton

  immersed in windy chinook

  immersed in barbecue aroma

  immersed in smog

  immersed in someone’s sneeze

  immersed in the oxygen produced by cedar

  immersed in the oxygen produced by fir

  immersed in the oxygen produced by hemlock

  immersed in carbon dioxide

  immersed in the colonial present

  immersed in loonsong

  immersed in endocrine disrupting dust

  immersed in the smell of the ocean

  immersed in stale air

  immersed in English

  immersed in ego-jacking capitalism

  immersed in thought

  immersed in ancestral respect, or not

  immersed in natureculture

  immersed in electromagnetic fields

  immersed in gravity

  immersed in radio waves

  immersed in multilingual contact zone

  immersed in transmission frequencies

  immersed in ultraviolet rays

  immersed in someone’s perfume

  immersed in ambient sound

  immersed in neighbourhood vibe

  immersed in urban hurry

  immersed in pedestrian drift

  immersed in the protocol of sunlight

  immersed in the irrepressible commons, come on!

  immersed in q’élstexw

  unsung service

  for Staləw, the Fraser River

  perched on a paddlewheeler, typing on my fraught laptop

  on the Samson V, in the midst of freshet

  big puppy-eyed, sleek river otter silently glides.

  together otter & i witness raw logs floating down the Fraser

  accelerated export to empires south & east of us

  quickly doubling sales of tree kill, when we, the moose & the murrelets want

  the trees here, alive

  tree care is self-care

  ship’s whistle blasts, deep & foggy

  once manned by Captain Drinkwater, trans Samson calls

  shallow, steady & strong, she faces the port where mazdas & audis enter

  as raw logs exit, the engine of capitalist ideology attacks the river

  constant container activity as swallows zip, seagulls dive

  ladybug, bee, placid mandarin ducks, humans promenade

  flip through Meteorology for Seamen & The Theory and Practice of Seamanship on the desk

  where does the museum exhibit begin & end?

  what will future earthlings find in the neoliberal middens left behind?

  microbial murmur: tardy but still need to act up

  zoanosis prompts

  crossing thresholds, game-changers on elder river

  footsteps above, creosote beside & interference below

  industrial habit morphs fish home into trade zone

  underneath the opaque river, life i cannot see

  implacable sturgeon carries on

  in the river that brought us all here to this city

  the river that holds our future in its flows

  We are tardigrades and tawny owls, river dolphins and rockhopper penguins, slow sloths and fast elk. We are not stuffed animals to be deserted and betrayed as your political “leaders” listen to money and ignore the acidifying ocean, the tumultuous tsunami, hurricanes, floods that shout climate instability. We are your relatives. When you capture us in zoos, you diminish yourselves and us. We precede and supersede Moloch, the Koch brothers and the patriarchal mind games that have been shoved down our throats and into our gall bladders. Some of us will survive you and some of us have not. We call upon you to remember your ancient oaths, your debts to all realms that enable your existence, your obligations as earth-dwellers.

  medicines in the city

  一

  horsetail hints

  at abundant water beneath

  transformed into fine green nodes

  sprouting up from cracks in pavement

  near Main & Broadway

  atop what was once Brewery Creek

  horsetail hails the sturdy spore, the perpetual wind

  its ally in propagation

  scrub brush, toothbrush, remover of toxins

  horsetail ever-so-slowly heals inflictions

  a living fossil who quietly outlasts our cities

  soaking up the acid soil we leave behind

  二

  lavender blossoms

  in the traffic circle

  guerrilla garden tenacity

  fed by rain, sun, evolving bylaws

  car exhaust & pedestrian breadth

  big doggie breath, small doggie do

  fed by kiddy bustle

  sensible cyclists balance

  loaves of bread in their baskets

  buddies play Jimi Hendrix

  their guitars kiss the sky

  healers turn buds into

  salve, tea, soap, story

  elementary activity

  primary activity

  an East Van dance

  a black soil miracle

  reassuring windsway

  contingent cousin

  roundabout whiff

  soothing the city

  one modest root<
br />
  by mythic root

  surviving with

  bee by living bee

  三

  found in fields from Halifax to Vancouver

  plantain’s nickname is white man’s footprint

  for the way it gets everywhere

  yet there is also native plantain

  to poultice your cuts & rashes

  to heal the sores of everyday life

  plantain sits & spreads

  mown down & ever growing

  overlooked neighbour

  gently toughing us all out

  四

  salal remembers the forests

  before the streets

  its juicy leaves & tender berries

  hold Salish history from the sun

  tickled with glistening rains

  bolstered with the languorous weight of summer heat

  salal ripens

  五

  after eighty destructive years

  industrial blockage of salmon habitat

  we celebrate this uncanny return in the city:

  salmon to Still Creek in 2012

  alert, adept swimmers

  kindle, perpetuate, astound

  with sleek scaly stamina

  miraculous as the salmon that grace Musqueam Creek

  with each year’s turn around the sun

  an unbroken vow between relatives

  body burden: a moving target

  bone, tendon, muscle, joint inflamed

  knuckle, wrinkle, nail, ten half moons

  a seven-pound skin, well distributed

  so light i don’t feel what i carry

  rashes, scars, bruises, faint scratches

  eczema reminds

  fragile barrier, easily broken

  inner oozes out, itchy lymph