Proctor Creek
That ripe sewage scent is anaerobia’s byproduct:
bacterial mouthfuls packed with saturated leaves,
slipped cork, accumulations of deer, rabbit,
bluegill & snail droppings: dank odor strengthening
with stagnation, since beaver dams block debris
all along this tributary, snagging streetside flotsam,
litterfall, gas-station wrappers. Upstream, last year’s sieve
stands infested with builders silting their ways into
the mix. Once that gleaming land was Don’s, a pasture
with tractors out back, willow oaks shading every June.
Now it’s a gruel of rebar, lumber, aggregate.
Fields & creeks are precious things, falling always
into the same successions, clogged with weeds or sludge,
warehouses or rodential impoundments. The constants
careening such systems seem mostly unchangeable
but so does the sole urge of us animals, that need
to stop flow, fight decay. Isn’t it the inherent
nature of things to be emptied & filled again:
Don’s land, the river-valleys? All trees get chewed
into lodges or tract-homes planting some codger’s
useless meadow, though these identical processes
aren’t so comparable. Paddling this stream, passing
the golf-course, that much is clear. So each copied day
I look on our work, snaring myself or burrowing
deep into the bone-den we make, and when the light
at last swims free of its gaps I’ll weave a woody
bed of the world, sleepless on what becomes of us.
Acworth, Georgia
Monk’s Mound Meditation
Dad sifted Cahokia’s dregs at age twelve, found coiled
shrapnel, shells crammed in soil, smooth but baring fractures
formed beneath the molars of organic collapse.
In millenia since-seeped, those conchs held warm sips
steeped in herbal sacrament. To lips they rose,
traces of yaupon trapped in their bicarbonate seams:
yaupon, which grows as weeping masses in lowcountry,
by my grandmother’s house, across meted chunks of chain
& seared marshes, the historic source for grass-weavers,
their dugouts lining shores like moored gators, those people
who hopscotched uniquely caffeinated leaves from sea
to the Mississippi, to Cahokia, to brew
into drinks and energize hengeheld voices,
we learned. They left residues that Dad by chance brushed
one summer break, far from Chicago’s steel temples
and not long after the just death of DDT,
that beast which clawed sky from the lungs of songbirds,
melted eggs, loitered fresh for later consumption.
Now fall approaches, slower. Every weekend I sweep
shattered beer bottles from the lawn as trucks pass-by
pluming smoke to eradicate mosquitoes,
floating stark aromas and stinking of chemicals
yet to come, plunged past artifice into artifact,
whatever hangs upon the surface of things for years.
Clemson, South Carolina
Carson Colenbaugh is a poet and ecologist from Kennesaw, Georgia. His work has been published or is forthcoming in The Southern Review, North American Review, Birmingham Poetry Review, and elsewhere. He can be found on Instagram @carsoncolenbaugh.
Read two more poems by Carson Colenbaugh published in Terrain.org.
Header photo by Nature’sLens21, courtesy Pixabay.
