This poem and visual piece are part of a larger collaborative project, No River is a Love Story, which meditates on the history of interactions between lake sturgeon and human beings in the Lake Winnebago System.
Elegy for a River Dammed
And to the altered landscape. Altar, this river, for the built and unbuilt worlds, tangled. If you are still, you can see the river beneath the manmade lake, a palimpsest, echoes of earlier loonsong, flashes of summer tanagers. No river is a love story. It is an archive, becoming. But every river I’ve seen, I’ve loved. In the current, a memory I’d forgotten dislodges. I am by the Metolius, the Chena, the Two Hearted, with someone I loved but no longer know. Perhaps we love the river because we want to be what we once were. A river can run north, so can’t our grief be undone? Midwest farmlands, intricacy of industries. A nation needs to be fed. Irrigation lines laid, water diverted, rivers fragmented. I don’t have the answers, just the verbs of damage. We are not shadows on a wall—we act and are acted upon. You cannot hold a river all at once. You cannot know whose path you block. Sturgeon, bottomfeeder, recycler of excess, swimming in circles, dreaming of a spawning ground, a specific runnel upstream where the water is sweet and clear. For 100 years, no fish spawned in the waters above the Shawano Dam. Now, we carry them back. There are so many kinds of violence. Many ways to love—snake, braid, meander. Yield. The seam where it starts, dangerous as a human idea.
Caitlin Scarano is a writer based in Bellingham, Washington. She holds a Ph.D. from the University of Wisconsin-Mikwaukee and an MFA from the University of Alaska Fairbanks. Her second full-length collection of poems, The Necessity of Wildfire, was selected by Ada Limón as the winner of the Wren Poetry Prize and was released in spring 2022 by Blair. Caitlin is a member of the Washington Wolf Advisory Group and a participant in the Bonanza Creek Experimental Forest’s In a Time of Change program. She was selected as a participant in the NSF’s Antarctic Arts & Writers PRogram and spent November 2018 in McMurdo Station in Antarctica. You can find her at caitlinscarano.com.
Amy E. Casey is a Milwaukee-based writer and illustrator. Her visual poetry work has been seen in Split Rock Review, Psaltery & Lyre, and Short Run. She can’t stop writing about fish: her debut novel The Sturgeon’s Heart (Gibson House Press) is now available. Find her at Find her at www.amyecasey.com.
Header image by Amy E. Casey. Photo of Amy E. Casey by Jessica Kaminski.
