“Like a river flowing”
“Christine Smart’s poems perform acts of clear-eyed unsentimental recollection and fierce longing, and move with an earthy music that is all their own. The reader is left with a sense of the sharp, bittersweet tang of the authentic.”
Don McKay
Wild Place
"Art in a time of radical loss is an elegy.
It teaches us how to mourn...” Alison Hawthorne Deming.
I. First Wild Place
The creek below the farm: secret, separate,
muddy spring snowmelt— a river—
rapids roared, banks eroded,
overflowed and flooded fields.
Stay clear, mother warned: slippage, drowning.
I dawdled at the edge, roughly
a lie, no time for play on that farm, no running
wild, mud-streaked and free, always
held back, standing on the brink.
The creek called me
to play, water burbled, I jumped
stepping stones
slippery in shade or sun,
and dappled light.
Banks scoured and damp,
birds warbled and frogs croaked
I splashed among reeds.
The creek dissected the farm
nameless source, imagined destination,
the boundary fence: barbed wire.
Long hot days, summer sun-dried,
cow pies and hoof-print sludge
the log bridge decayed, the wild
wetland, a hide-away escape
the snaking gulley under sugar maples,
in cool damp dark.
II. Last Wild Place, circa 2050
The creek below the farm
dry, oh so dry,
the log bridge collapsed, no gap
to fall through, no
red maples, the gulley parched
and choked with thistles.
A west wind blows cinders,
corn crops withered, soil depleted.
The sky, a great blue basket
of heat, no clouds or thunderheads.
The creek bed echoes rumbling,
the smooth rocks speak
silent tears.
III. How did I get back here?
A long hot trek, crossing
the country from west to east on foot, I saw no
ancestors only tracks
but no trains, highways and gravel roads,
no cars or trucks. Airport
runways invaded,
dandelions in the cracks.
Round stepping-stones
stuck in the dry
creek bed, weathered, worn
weeping dust,
fossils: small signals
remember cool water, flooding
spring run off.
Quiet, oh so quiet, burned dry, I found water
gushing from my eyes,
the path rough and ragged, I could do
nothing.
Published in “Sweet Water”, Poems for the Watersheds, ed. Yvonne Blomer, 2020.