High-Water Mark
Mar 23 2011


A dark line on the wall,
4 ft up
smudged
above musty buckling sheetrock.
Black mould, blooming.
A mix of silt, and mud
and toxic sludge.
A sudden thaw
of river run-off,
the hundred year flood.
So an average life
and the odds aren’t as long as we thought.

After the water recedes
we can’t quite bring ourselves to clean it.

I remember looking down
the tunnel of stairway
into the concrete block basement,
braced against the doorframe
feeling tipsy
disbelief.
Saw the freezer bobbing past,
the flotsam and jetsam
of suburban rec rooms,
a bizarre aquarium
of mismatched chairs.
Or an abandoned indoor pool
full of cold dark water,
stinking of spring
and live electric current.

I am proud of that high-water mark,
that I survived calamity
that life went on.
And now I have a story to tell
even better, embellish,
buff the truth, as story-tellers do.
See, it’s true, I can say
triumphantly pointing.

We try to leave our mark
in the world,
imagining posterity
keeping track of things.

Like the marks on the wall
every birthday
we couldn’t bear painting over.
Straighten-up, butt flush
no slouching, or tip-toes.
Growth spurts, and rites of passage
in the old frame house
that eventually got sold
when the market sunk
the mortgage wouldn’t float.
“Underwater”, they called it,
liquidating assets.

Anyway, by now the kids are grown
long gone.
Sent-off
with tears, and waves
and bon voyage,
and hopes for a hundred years of grace
from every kind of flood.


Haven’t been writing well, or much. Actually, thought I was pretty much over it, time to move on to something else. So I’m grateful for this poem: that I think it’s pretty good; the way it struck me with sudden and irresistible inspiration.

This occurred while I was watching the first season of that terrific HBO series Treme (pronounced “tremmay”). It takes place 3 months after hurricane Katrina, and the subsequent flood of New Orleans. (What a great setting: by far the most idiosyncratic and exotic city in the United States. The music alone is worth the price of admission.) There were scenes of water damaged buildings, water paintings on the walls that were now just vague smudges of colour, the high-water marks of the flood. And it brought me back to my own flood: a story I’ve often told, but never really commemorated in poetry.

It was the expression “high-water mark” that really triggered me, especially its metaphorical power. I guess the imagery of marks on the wall that tracked our growth naturally followed. What I cannot explain is how the recent financial meltdown entered into this. But it worked out nicely: lots of good aquatic metaphors, for one!

What this poem is really about is perseverance, the fatalistic and consoling philosophy of “this too shall pass”. And also maybe the irony contained in “high-water mark”, the idea of unrealized potential: how things actually turn out, once our great aspirations collide with the cold hard real world outside our control. Or parenthood, when the high-water mark may well have been the first year of life: you do your best for 18 or 20 years, then let go, relinquishing them to their own follies and future lives.