Sweet Water

March 22 2018

Before the white froth of surf.

Before the green glass 
where the swells start to flatten
then bottom out.

Before the majestic procession of waves, glinting with sun

that roll metronomically shoreward

I can hear its dull roar.

And even further inland

where I first encountered the smell,

overwhelmed

by the sharp tang of brine

and mucous-coated life
and warm stagnant waste,

the fishy stink

and rotting weeds

and decomposing flesh.

The cool astringent air

heavy with fog.

And when my journey ends
at the rich inter-tidal,

teeming with shelled creatures scuttling

and soft burrowing worms,

probing birds

on bent pencil legs.

With algae, limpets, crabs.

With barnacled rocks

damp and knobbly,

tenacious plants, inured to salt,

their long bedraggled tendrils

a deep absorbent green.

Which is all too much for me

accustomed to this small land-locked lake.

Its thin water

fresh enough to drink.

Its shallow wash

over cleanly scoured stones.

The few solitary fish

slipping through the dark

of its cold still reaches.

How simple to comprehend,

how comforting

in its changelessness.

Nothing here

of the amniotic sea,

the churn of the shore,

the rich abundance

of subaquatic life.

Even the trees are marginal.

Spindly fir

and witchy black spruce,

small sheltering cedars

and struggling pines   —

the descendants

of once great whites.

Leggy aspen

in dense weedy patches,

and striking silver birch

that grow too slow to flourish.

Where I feel at home,

immersed

in its sweet water,

the earthy spice

of its sparse boreal woods,

its brisk northern air.

Far from the stench and mess and vastness

of the one great ocean

that spans the world;

the danger

its black surface conceals,

the desperate drama

of life and death

in silent bottomless depths.

This is the second time I've entitled a poem Sweet Water. (I note, too, that I've posted the first poem twice: apparently, an updated version as well as the original.) It just fits this poem too well to resist. The expression emphasizes the essential contrast that runs through the piece: the thinness of my small land-locked lake compared to the rich ocean and inter-tidal; between fresh-water and marine. Which could really all be simply contained in salt vs sweet.

This is something I've often considered: my aversion to salt-water swimming; my preference for freshwater lakes over open ocean. This probably says a lot about me: more comfortable with a simpler ecology, with smallness and stability, with less life and mess.

But what triggered this poem today was reading a piece in the latest New Yorker (March 26 2018) by Jill Lepore about Rachel Carson – the celebrated write of Silent Spring – and her earlier and more prolific writing about marine biology (The Right Way to Remember Rachel Carson). Lepore's opening paragraph was beautifully written: really, closer to poetry than prose, and something I must have re-read at least 3 times. Here it is:

The house, on an island in Maine, perches on a rock at the edge of the sea like the aerie of an eagle. Below the white-railed back porch, the sea-slick rock slopes down to a lumpy low tideland of eelgrass and bladder wrack, as slippery as a knot of snakes. Periwinkles cling to rocks; mussels pinch themselves together like purses. A gull lands on a shaggy-weeded rock, fluffs itself, and settles into a crouch, bracing against a fierce wind rushing across the water, while, up on the cliff, lichen-covered trees—spruce and fir and birch—sigh and creak like old men on a damp morning.

Frankly, I think her paragraph puts my poem to shame. But, of course, I'm writing about something different, and felt impelled to have a go at it not in the spirit of competition, but simply to say what I've been thinking about saying for awhile now. And at least my poem has given me an opportunity to share this lovely little paragraph.