A POEM FOR THE RIVER: A COLLABORATION

Words on pieces of birchbark are floating somewhere along the river.
A poem for the river. That no one but the river will read. In molecular braille.
The lines are nonlinear, creating their own logic in motion.
Dropped at different times, one catches on a twig, another
swirls around a rock where the river speeds up.
There is no record of its circulation.

I went to the river at the peak of the season. The busiest weekend of the tourist season on the Island. It's the Wikwemikong Pow Wow (Indigenous), and Haweater Festival (settler). We save our biggest fireworks for this weekend.

I have avoided the river for much of the summer. The intensity of the verdure, the masses of intertwining leaves, the 2' poison ivy, the streams of tourists at the falls seemed too much for me this year. The perimeter of my life has shrunk to the circuit around my house. I've not put my canoe on the car; I've not picked blueberries. I am sinking into quiet, here at the house, at the water.

But this weekend I went to the river, in full day, not at the edges of the day, not only at the base of the river where fewer tourists go. I parked, somehow finding a spot in the lot at the falls, and spent 5 hours over two days sitting on a rock watching people, and keeping company to my 'poem box'.

A few years ago I came up with the Drawing Box Project idea - a project for 4elements Living Arts (an org I co-founded in 2002, and for which I acted as founding Artistic and Executive Director for 15 years). The Drawing Box idea was one of my less complex creations at 4e (unlike Elemental Festival or the Connections Trail public art trail which I founded/curated). Less complex, but lovely and engaging, a quiet project, the Drawing Box was designed as an invitation to walkers (those who know the trails and a way to invite new walkers to them). Wooden boxes were gently strapped to trees on 15 trails across the Island; these geocached boxes, stuffed with drawing materials, and pre-made drawings by guest artists and 4e staff to get them started, invited a trade in drawings, rather than than the standard geocache exchange. Walkers would leave a drawing and take a drawing. Over a full year walkers and snowshoers visited the boxes.

I had one one of the prototype boxes in my basement. I shined it up, and put it to use as a poetry box. I've been working on a book of poetry, provisionally titled 'Interview with a River'. I'm thrilled to say I just received a Canada Council for the Arts grant to support me to work it up into a full collection.

All of the poems respond to, and engage with the river as a complex ecosystem (biotic and abiotic, historical, colonial, cultural and psycho-social). Some of the poems are written in collaboration with the river.

So, this weekend, I placed the box on a flat rock at the falls, and sat around the corner from it. On the box, I taped the invitation and instructions:

Poem for the River: an invitation

What words would you send down the river?

Thanks? for…? A prayer for the river? Secret words? Your secret name? Words you can’t forget? Things you wish you’d said? Remembrances? A line for a lost love? What you wish you’d remember about today years from now? Botanical names of river plants? A promise? A beautiful detail? A lament for mother earth, and rising water? A half remembered dream? …..?

Steps

Write your words on the birchbark. Send your piece of birch bark down the river. If you so choose, copy what you wrote in the notebook. I will write a poem with the words left in the notebook. Leave me your email address if you want me to send a message when the poem is finished. To see the final poem visit: sophieanneedwards.blogspot.com

Thank-you. Merci. Miigwetch.

It was interesting to watch people find the box. Some wary, others curious but uninterested in the invitation. Some carefully lifting the box, perhaps expecting an unpleasant joke; others letting the lid slam down. While I could often predict who would write something, I was surprised a few times. One man clearly wanted to write some words, "Look, we can add words to this poem, and send them down the river," but his significant other was uninterested, "I don't have a pen" she said, walking way. "There are pens in the box," he responded to her back as she walked away. He followed, but turned back a moment or two later, pulled to the box. I do not know what he wrote on the birchbark, or which line is his in my notebook.

There were many people that sent their words down the river and didn't share them. One woman spent quite a long while at the box, and returned several times. She watched her bark carefully, seeing it float past her family. She didn't add to my notebook, but I could feel the emotion of her experience.

At 4elements, I was motivated by this emotional connection, believing (and having seen) that building nature 'muscle,' building emotional connections, along with returns to the same places build ecological connections, and a sense of stewardship. This cultural shift is so critical to an environmental shift. But I don't think we have enough time for this process-based approach, for this slow movement.

In the chaos of the calls and the laugher, the splashing and swimming, the box was a moment of quiet at the edges, where the falls and the pool becomes river again. The bathers and the watchers, the selfie takers and the picnic-ers, all drawn to the water, to being near the spray, to feeling somehow connected, buoyant with life. I don't know how many were thinking about our relationships to water, to the history of this place. I was perhaps the most subdued of the visitors, sitting on my rock, thinking about how we have collectively sent the planet toward chaos of another kind, that we are over the cliff's edge. I don't understand how to carry on, but I also don't know how to do anything but carry on with life, like we all do. But our living isn't a testament to spirit, but rather to oblivion.

My attempts at poetry seem merely quixotic.