The River

I am born of the river.

It flows

Above

And beneath.

Each day

My frenzied wheels ride over

While below, she passes

Unlabored.

All along,

Her banks defining

Scenery

And the landscape of my existence.

The cottonwoods

Entrenched

Upon the shores

Ripple in the afternoon breeze

Ubiquitous and soothing.

Placidly, the mink

--- of secretive stock,

Pauses to consider his place.

The low groaning of a bullfrog

Echoing from a languid tributary

Speaks to deeper places

Than language dare utter.

And I, alone,

Totter on;

The uncertain newcomer,

Beset with schedules and lists,

Persistently unaware of my

Want, of my dire estate.

My occupied mind

Deaf

To the thrush’s liquid warble

And the looming voice

Of the Lord.

But wherever my duties

Take me

Patiently

            Patiently

                        She waits,

Her lessons learned over

Millennia, culled of the

Spirit who speaks

In whirlwinds and whispers;

Songs in the tongue

Of quivering boughs

And slow eddies, suspended

In time. Sweet praises raised

By the rushing of reeds,

The idling clouds,

And the nourishing air which

Fulfills the want of lungs

And preaches of the gift

Of moments given

Which cannot be stolen or

Returned by force of will.

Drab and muddy

Clear and clean

A voice,

Like one in the wilderness

Calling,

‘Repent,

            Repent,

Lay your burdens upon the green hillocks;

Your cares beside the lapping waters

And pass beneath the surface

Be filled forevermore.’

Pt. 2 - Ghost Town

The clouds crept slowly, almost imperceptibly across the azure sky. Here and there a particularly ambitious cumulus humilis cast its sprawling shadow over the neighborhood. The successive canopies of oaks in lush summer array shifted aquatically and hissed in the high, soft breeze. Up above there was clarity and order. As he got farther away from his home, the streets which sat vacant and abandoned were often bisected by limbs or even full trees. He had cleared the most egregious offenders in his own neighborhood either out of necessity or ease of travel but here, just a few miles away, the deadfall remained untouched.

He hated being this far from home; this exposed; but necessity dictated risk. With the lack of rainfall he simply couldn’t risk exhausting his supply from the barrels. With the river being only a mile or so away, he had at least the luxury of obtaining more. In addition, he could wash out some of the worst of his dirty laundry. While he didn’t relish the prospect of lugging back the gallons of water, he savored less the potential of doing so when it was a dire need, perhaps when the weather was far less amenable than today.

Slung over his shoulders was a nylon strap of old seatbelts attached to a furniture dolly carrying a moderately clean garbage can which would serve as transportation for the water--- another of his backward innovations. At its best, what now amounted to progress was like trying to rewind an old tangled cassette tape with a pencil, or better yet, a pencil-shaped stick which fractured periodically.

Power lines sagged listlessly, devoid now of purpose. Some lay in tangles among the shards of shattered trees. Others held taut seemingly out of sheer defiance.

Ahead, just before High Ridge dead-ended into Huron River Drive, he could see a break in the tree line where the river had been dammed to form Ford Lake by Henry Ford himself during the magnate’s ambitiously optimistic plan to provide hydroelectric power for his nearby auto plants. It was hard to fathom the seemingly boundless ambition that Ford and others of his era had for progress and societal advancement. Though not without its flaws, there was much to be praised in these optimistic futurists who sought not only to amass personal wealth but also the civic good. Now, much of their drive was a crumbling edifice. Several years before the dam partially collapsed under the strain of a particularly intense period of flood, drastically altering the shoreline of Belleville Lake a few miles downstream and damaging the bridge at Rawsonville Road. The irony of Rawsonville being damaged was not lost on Declan Foster who knew well the history of the area.

Once there had been a village of Rawsonville located a mile southeasterly which had been settled in 1830’s. Rawsonville, while never attaining the proportions of its neighbors Ann  Arbor, Ypsilanti, or even Belleville, still had its own community, school, and post office. Never growing beyond a few hundred residents, Rawsonville muddled along for the better part of a century before its lack of railroad stop led to it ceding business and population to its larger neighbors. By 1925 when the Eastern Michigan Edison Company finished completion on its plan to put in its own hydroelectric dam there were few remaining citizens to object. Upon mutual agreement, the remaining citizens were bought out and the ghost town of Rawsonville sunk beneath the rising waters of the Huron, its hopes and dreams banished to the floor of the new lake.

An overgrown ballfield fell away before him as Ford Lake emerged sparking in the sunshine. As his head bobbed from the weight of the cart, Declan mused on Rawsonville’s forgotten remains. What remained of the community now? The milfoil encrusted frame of a house? An old tire? What became of the schoolhouse? Very likely no discernable remains of the village now existed, the testament to its impact extinguished by silt and aquatic creatures.

He looked out on the decaying buildings, the burned out cars, the vine-ridden chimneys crumbling unnaturally before their warranty. He could see curtains softly shifting behind an open window almost as if the homeowner had just stepped out for a moment. Such domesticity in the shade of blistering tragedy. In a nearby yard a pair of stalwart hostas flourished in spite of the assault, or rather, reclamation, of native invaders. Shrinking footprints of grass created a patchwork history of human cultivation while the world pressed in from the fringes.

Declan reached the end of a paved drive and began descending a broken concrete decline. The cart bounced behind him twice falling off the pavement and into a ditch nearly tipping. He pulled the straps with considerable effort and cursed as the cart bashed into his heels. The trail leveled out and the rippling aqua waters of Ford Lake lay before him shimmering in the midday sun. As he pulled a severed length of hose from the can to syphon the water he watched the horizon with consideration. Just discernable between a distant patch of cottonwoods a thin sliver of smoke rose. Declan frowned.

A May Morning

The potent spring dawn broken

By the burgeoning storm,

A tide of violet eclipsing the horizon.

The air, in thickening expectation

Bends to taunt the yawning earth.

Grasses stir from their dew-heavy slumber

Their entreaties received by the pregnant sky.

In placid air the birdsong

Stilled, replaced by thunder’s

Sonorous roar and the branching

Fiery crack of light

--- that tremulous vein.

As the first ample drops collide

With windshields and wilderlands,

The silent praises of mouse and man

Rise as earth receives its consolation.

Pt. 1 - The Dog

He awoke late. The midsummer sun was already filtering in through the tattered curtains. He’d be behind from the start. It was hot and the thin sheet clung to his sweaty body. He prepared himself mentally to rise but his listless bones seemed to work against him. They lay anchored to the bed as if bound my inescapable fetters. He groaned and swung his left leg off the edge of the bed. Raising his torso proved more difficult as he tried to prop himself up by pushing his left arm behind him. This failed and he fell back to the mattress where he lay motionless for a moment.

He heard a dog bark and was immediately made alert. Part of his mind noted the oddity that something once so domestic and benign now demanded immediate attention. His ears probed the morning for the gentle din of the chickens in the yard below. Before their low reverie had reached his brain, he was up, leaning, his palms flush against the cracked windowsill and surveying the land that he called his own. A portion of it was, by statute, his. Beyond that, the legality got a little bit hazy. The only remnants of the back fence which had once divided the two properties were the cement posts at either end of the line. He had been unable to remove them and had quickly given up, leaving them to remain just another decrepit memorial to civilization--- that grand experiment.

Beside the makeshift coop (which was once merely a toolshed) the chickens ambled about contentedly plucking seed and grit from the windswept ground all the while feigning indifference to the delay in their morning meal. Satisfied that the small flock was safe, the man reached to the dresser which sat beside the window and grabbed a pair of shorts with a belt still looped through and began pulling his legs through. He nearly toppled back into bed before successfully dressing himself. He didn’t bother changing his shirt.

Moments later, as he walked out the coop, he was wearing a sun-bleached Detroit Tigers hat ostensibly aimed at keeping the sun off his increasingly ample forehead which, in reality, had long ago given itself in to a perpetual tan. Almost every exposed surface of the yard had been converted into some way into farmable land yet somehow grass still seemed to spring from the very rocks of the path. To his left, a raised bed assembled from discarded pallet remnants housed an abundant assortment of greens in various stages of growth, indeed some had already gone to seed, and on the right, a wheelbarrow with a flat tire held the bulk of a squash whose vines crept out and over the edges, worming their way across the yard like verdant, coiling cephalopods and whose roots dangled from the gaps in the corroded metal--- strange stalactites.

The portions of the yard which were not currently heavy with produce hosted a litany of ramshackle tools and building supplies salvaged over the years from those more (or less) fortunate than himself. Thistles and weeds sprung up prodigiously. Sparrows splashed in pools of dirty rainwater.

The coop itself was a testament to impressed ingenuity with its battered roof a mosaic of patchwork fixes. The door, however, fit snugly and securely and the latch still shone in the sunshine.

Sliding the latch he did quick mental math before accounting for each of his hens. The rooster, a thick Bantam, was most likely foraging somewhere nearby but out of sight. More assurance. Even trivial assurances brought joy (or something like it) in a world of uncertainty.

He retrieved a sack of feed from the shelf and tossed it haphazardly through the mesh grating to the waiting hens who lined up like shoppers snapping up doorbuster savings. So long ago, he thought. Who would even remember the reference now? Another relic. Another fading page. How long until time and tide swallowed it all? How long until all he’d known was just another context-less monument eroding beneath a veil of dust? How quickly we vanish, he thought.

The hens gave no pause for contemplation.

Returning the bag he relatched the door, squinting against the blinding sun. From somewhere off in the distance, closer now, it seemed, the dog barked again. More a sharp yelp than a bark it was. He glared back out towards the front of the house. He hand absently fingered the cracked handle of a hoe.