Cuyahoga - May 9 2021

 

Cuyahoga

May 9 2021

 

I remember when the river

in some rusting industrial town

with air that burned your throat

and lots of smoke-filled bars

where hard women

with peroxide hair and foul mouths

caught on fire.

 

How is this possible, I thought,

aren't water and fire opposites?

Back then

when we saw ourselves apart

from nature.

Believed

that we could send out waste away,

flushed downstream

or up a big black brick stack

high enough for the wind 

to dump it in the next town.

 

The river came back

and you can even eat the fish there.

But no one believes me now,

even with the pictures

and the headlines

of the Cuyahoga in flames.

The past is past, they say,

and if I wasn't alive back then

it doesn't matter

if it happened or not.

 

I've lived through a lot

forgotten most of it.

But fire on water

is unforgettable.

 

It's still there, of course,

in the sediment and air

and post-industrial soil.

Our sins are not expunged,

the traces of our thoughtless lives

persist.

 

Carbon dioxide lasts 200 years,

we, at best, a hundred.

Who knows how long a river runs

an ocean dwells untouched.

 

But at least the bars

have been cleaned up,

turned into studios

for yoga and art.

The hard women

are probably long gone;

or are old, and incontinent

and struggling for breath.

I know the first paragraph is somewhat incoherent, and a good editor would have had his thick red pencil out. But this is poetry, not prose, and I like the misdirection and momentary confusion. (Probably not the clearest writing to have 5 lines separating the subject of a sentence from its object and verb!)

This poem ended up being a rant about pollution and climate change, but I think the earnest tone that could have so easily made it unreadable is rescued by the diverting imagery and tangential reflections. One of these ideas is the contrast in the sense of time:  the transience of human affairs; the longevity of nature. The poem also has something to say about historical ignorance; or, to be generous, the different perspective and life experience of subsequent generations.

I suppose how you end up feeling after reading this depends on how much of an optimist or pessimist you are. Yes, you can now eat the fish there. (I didn't fact-check this. But I know some heavily polluted waterways have been brought back enough for it.) On the other hand, CO2 lasts 200 years:  what we produce now is adding to stuff that's still in the air from early in the Industrial Revolution! And even if we stopped greenhouse gas emissions dead in its tracks today, what we made last year will be there for the next 200 and still heating up the planet.    . . .As you might infer, I'm a pessimist to the bone!

I should add that the real inspiration for this poem was from a documentary on river pollution called River Blue, part of which I watched last night.

Dacca, Bangladesh left a powerful impression:  the chaos, congestion, and polluted mess of the city itself, as well as the Buriganga River, which was a toxic murky soup of deoxygenated water. Really, an unlivable place of hard lives cut short by early cancers and poisoned bodies. Perhaps a glimpse into our collective future.

The movie also offered an unstinting condemnation of the fashion industry, since so much of the pollution there is a result of producing cheap disposable clothing for us:  the original sin of "fast fashion" and the short term imperatives of consumption-driven capitalism. We contract out the waste that we should rightfully own. Out of sight, out of mind. There is a deep failure of morality here.