Again (again?) thinking about that treacherous “about”-ness of poems, or of my attempts toward a poem. How seeking to write “about” some Important Thing makes my work flat and explainy and earnest in the way of a Hallmark card. Nevertheless, I persevere. I have been trying to figure out how to write a poem that informs, as I want to talk about Important Subjects in a way that Opens the Eyes, but I want to do it with grace, ease, play, subtlety.
But do I, as a reader, want to be informed? Is that what I want from a poem? No. Something else. I want the something elseness of poetry. The subtext and subtle unsaid and loud silences and momentary confusions that ease into — what? — a moment of wisdom, maybe, or of connection to an Other, or of perspective, insight, or something more visceral — the ah ha, the oh, the yes.
What I admire about this poem by Jennifer K. Sweeney is that she is committed to communicating information but also to the playful use of sound and language to carry that information out of the sometimes-tedious realm of explication. And also how the denseness and movement of it enact the subject matter. How it dams and flows, hurriedly gathers and lets loose.
I sometimes ponder the arcane information I have learned from fiction — I know to keep my heels down if I go off a ski jump (thanks, Nancy Drew), and how starfish regrow arms (thanks, Madeleine L’Engle), that the province of Quebec is a hotbed of organized crime (thanks, Louise Penny). But I have not considered all that I’ve learned from poems, mostly because what I learn is less arcane information and more like life. But hey, if a poem wants to slip me some info, well, bring it.
Slowing Down the River
Jennifer K. Sweeney
When beavers are threatened—
water moves faster, darts straighter, stops
its slow seesaw into sloughs and side channels
and stops the smock and linger of pond racket,
less water spreads across floodplains, less plants
root, edgewater flowers not stationed to bloom,
less birdsong, less chatter, less surface skimmer,
less water stored underground, less summer
seepage, more fire, less swamp, less leaf-huddle,
stick hovel, less hidey-holes for native fish, less
sediment, less firmament, less space for Sockeye
who spend half their lives in fresh streams, who
need deep slow water to hide from predators
and feast, to rest from raging spring currents,
less silver-maroon braids of water & matter, less
refuge, less salmon, who in a healthy river have
so little chance to survive the run, and when the
slick runs overfast, life is chased right out of it,
and when beavers cannot be restored quickly
enough to their woodsy-banksy lives—those
sweet-hunkered fiberworkers crafting detritus
into lattice and cave—whose communal busying
changes time-flow into longshore drift and spawn,
the water stops breaking, the soil-rich pools empty,
the salmon the salmon the salmon the salmon
less full less welcome, less shallows for thousands
of eggs laid in redds, less silt for young who grow
under gravel, so that beaver “analogs” mimic
their structures, beavers without beavers, restoring
riparian dams so the waters might wait for the
furred sod-lifters to return to the river’s lap and
grind and gather—hear it—so the Sockeye will
continue on, the Sockeye who are sometimes swiped
by bear paws and taken deep into wood, and who
then feed the forest, their nitrogen found in the salt
heart of the Sempervirens.
https://www.wayfarermagazine.com/p/slowing-down-the-river
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