Remember the Water

I've just learned that Lake Powell is an artificial lake. This is a jolt, as my last name is Powell. Thoughts of inauthenticity flood in. I begin to question the pure-water associations floating the mind for nearly half a century.

I rode around that lake at age eighteen on a Kawasaki, and swam nude for the first time in a deep blue cove where the waters slapped hard on barren cliffs. Though I was feeling extraordinarily free as adolescent on a motorcycle trip, I couldn't escape the parameters of identity as manifested between the name of this paradise and myself. Powell on the road signs, the name of the waters, and there on my driver's license. 

Lake Powell's coastline was warped by massive undulations just like my adolescence. It was longer than the West Coast of the U.S.A, or something unbelievable like that.

Come to find out it wasn't born until the 1960s. Just like me. An electric and recreational project like so many postwar marriages. Glen Canyon would be filled up, yet it would lay there underneath for decades, under the heaviness of water.

It's taken twenty years of drought to reduce its levels to a kind of desert oasis, says the clickbait. Some want the levels back, for boating, the beauty, for the economy. Farmers, merchants, indians, the tax base, they're all fighting hard. And of course the others; the natural order of things.

The Colorado River now moves slowly on its level plains swamped in muddy waters, becoming a verdant hub of plant and animal life. You find things here that haven't thrived since the early sixties, says a biologist.

When you are depleted, your levels lower than decades, consider Lake Powell. Consider the birds on their new limbs, and their meals crawling up trunks. Yet listen to the indian drums echoing off re-emergent cliffs, a farmer snuffing a dirt clod between his thumb and index finger, or a cash register in silent remembrance of higher levels.

But mostly, remember the water, how unbelievably wet and vigorous against the body after a long ride in, lapping, lapping.

I asked a Dalit man if he liked his job.

Upon Asking a Man If He Liked His Job

 
I ask a man if he likes his job
As it’s a dreadful industry, death
Stacking sticks of wood, then shoveling
Their white remains into the depths
 
His torso is varnished in the sun
Its glow and he work side by side
Kissing sweaty on the quarried blocks
Slick and final and steep
 
To the river where the dead
Are wrapped and left for ash
Where holy grounds meet flow
In layers of trash and weed
 
Spent wreaths and ribbons cast
On stone cut rough and polished underfoot
Textiles, awash in waves and wind
Tossed in the sorrow of piles
 
His white rough cotton wrap turned grey
Is soaked in perspiration and fume
The burn and wind enwrap his body
Against a sky that scorches flesh
 
His squint dark eyes accepting time
At the holiest of spots in heat
The incendiary force of which by choice
They are brought in wraps of orange
 
When the wind is wrong, the air
In its ironic humid smoke
Wafts up the steps like barbeque
Still months later in the throat
 
You could call it camaraderie
Beside him in humanity
If my ticket hadn’t cost more than
He makes in a year
 
At the lowest of the castes
He rides these steps of fate
I ask him if he likes his job
And his response lights a flame

His father, and his father, and so on
Six generations to his knowledge
Counting firewood by body weight
Stacking, lifting, shoveling
 
God wants me to do this
He says, through a smile of teeth
Stoic and willing, unencumbered
By the larger question

But by a man lying nearby surrounded
With fresh leaves, an incense cake
At his head, his wife leaning
Over his purple sunken eyes
 
My fellow gazes on the dead man too
Imperceptibly nodding, sizing him up
Slow, like a heartbeat, counting
His weight in sticks and blaze

In the Oaxacan Waves

Oaxacan Waves

Up and down goes the
Parisian woman
Not a day over thirty
In the Oaxacan waves

Not quite sixteen,
My son, the lucky boy
Swims the swells. Blue 
Pacific glee is all around

Together in water, about as much
As life allows a son
Freckles and teeth, as
Her breasts dance the surf

Minnows underneath
Dart unrestricted in their youth
As if, in silver and gold
They too sea

Can I cleave to this, stirred
By plump je ne sais quoi
And skirt the sorrows of the seas?
Can he escape the drowning?

We laugh, degajé to death
The evidence is in
She twirls at impact
As he dives under

You Are Lucky

You are lucky, you tell yourself. You saw it happen: A tree that sprung from the soil two hundred years ago sprawls along the ground. It had bent in winds so much more hurling than these.

This evening, on your walk through the woods, you've seen it fall! The mouth is agape, gathering and gathering. You watch, watch the space the tree had inhabited. Sky pours into it's space.  No one is around except you, and the animals have gone silent at their limbs.

You reflect on the initial crack that turned your head, the slow motion of its falling, and the air that swept up in a warm gust. Yet, you mostly stand at attention. It's as if by waiting, the dissipated sounds might be followed by pheromones, or a breakthrough. There will be time for calculations later. Concerns for your safety haven't even occurred. You have witnessed something sacred in this moment. You stand quiet with ringing in your ears from the cracking and that final snap of its trunk. This is worth more than what you've been eyeing in the showroom, or real estate, or trips you've craved for a while. As your eyes close, you recall friendships as a child, how your lungs filled and fainted with laughter--how everything smelled and everything meant and everything spacious. 

Spacious like the gap in the canopies before you when your eyes lift. And when a single bird begins to chirp again, you know it's time to keep going. And so you do, with the sun now beckoning at its extreme angle. 

What Can You Do?

What Can You Do?

Although the air quality alerts
You're hiking again
For clarity. A determination to
Live some way or another

Or have your lungs
Fill and faint with laughter
When you come across the poor thing
Laying there ahead

In the calm best light
With the sun looking curious
From the haze of the fires in Canada
And there she is in front of you

What can you do
But soak a cracker in water
Lay down a few cherries
Avert your eyes

Step back on the path
To ease its alarm
Decide that you cannot fathom
Ending its life

Watch it spin
On its dusty side
The back legs limp
Make the center

In circles of pain
From a raptor
Affliction, or snapping
Of spine

What can you do
But soak a cracker in water
Lay down a few cherries
And carry on

Except for my Sons

School is closed again today

Half way there, I slow peddle to a dock, lean my bike against the railing

The color of lake is the same as sky And the rail is gray with shadows. The grayscape penetrated only by a rising carp about to die

The Court of the Oceans had made it clear that we might sue for their warming

All picnics are cancelled through town. Children will stay on screens in bedrooms while fans churn the air

After the storm, trees and choirs and fun runs and electricity are down.

Down it all

Except for my sons, I would dive into the deepest sky. Hop the rails to some cobalt forest. Close the system down

I would swim to the wide dark center, close to where it all began

Except for my sons, blooming extraforcial beings. And this duck and I, floating on a curtain of dock, sharing this gray and open expanse, free as birds

A Holy Place

A Holy Place

You may sit wherever you please. Here, a menu, there are the services. Fan blades begin to whirl above your table

Burnt oil wafts up and out the open wall over the colors of vendors in the market

Yes, you'd like water and fresh coffee. The market women note you are dining at a place they will never

The one with menus handed to the customer. Where the silverware matches, with tablecloths, glossy, new and red

And you utter thank you again and again. That is a fine choice. You sit proud and contented, the only one in the room

Some places are sacrosanct. Incense proves this, as does the pretty print of Shiva hovering above waters

And the restaurateur standing attentive in a Pepsi mirror

In The Clouds

In the Clouds

In the clouds, there will be no shaking journals or dancing diaries
Zero neatly scrawled pages of velum, with tea stains or tears
Absolutely no outpouring of love, nor bloodletting of any sort
So many confessions will be spared online

It is to say the future will read nothing of our discontentment
Spared the strata of our favorite illusions, in bound pages
Honest, unedited, discovered in its feces and scars
Instead, the clouds will pour constantly of disinfected rain

We will wonder how paper
If rough drafts. Contemplate pens
What early man scrawled and spat at the rudiments
Of sheets