from “Flag”
Untitled
And what of flags? I refuse the immediate meaning. I wrestle the word down to the ground and find life seeping up. Wild iris, marsh herb calamus, fabric signal, the tail of some dogs, the tail of some deer, something rippling or wagging, object for attraction, stone suitable for pavement, to lay such stones, they say it’s for allegiance, my aunt thinks skin, I’m looking to a porous and fluid border, where the boundary cracks and green pours through, herb to mouth, to quilt to stone, water tucking into the bends, all this motion fills in! to flag or hang loose, to tire, decline, to hail, raise a concern, lost steadiness, oh love, greening earth, to mark for remembrance and return.
from Land mouth
The landscape possessed a life because the landscape, for me, is like an open book, and the alphabet with which one worked was all around me.
—Wilson Harris
The tide comes in and fills the beach. It makes pools and it makes streams. The streams are small and ephemeral. The streams move north and west, flowing down. The ocean isn’t situated the way I expected, I thought the ocean would be perfectly east of me but east is more beach and phragmites. Phragmites, let it be known, are a so-called invasive grass, displacing native plants like cattails and wild rice and encroaching on habitats’ biodiversity. Let it be known I am talking about the time I went to the beach in Barrington and walked off to record the tide coming in. Barrington is Wampanoag land; many Wampanoags died in an epidemic between 1615 and 1619. In 1653, investors from Plymouth Colony bought what was called Sowams and other adjacent land from the Wampanoags; this formed what would come to be known as Barrington, as well as parts of Swansea, Massachusetts and Bristol and Warren. In 1747, the town was ceded to Rhode Island and joined to Warren, then separated off again in 1770. That day in Barrington I crept off to the wetlands, then went back to the beach. I slipped into the water in my bike shorts and t-shirt, I floated with my eyes wide open.
Below the river is sediment and what if I called that sediment land? The river opening would be a land mouth. The river would not be a river but land. Hydrography might have something to say about this. Hydrography is a science of measurement and description; hydrographers measure and map out and describe water depths, the shape of the seafloor and coastline, the location of possible obstructions, and the physical features of water bodies. The National Ocean Service’s Office of Coast Survey completes these duties within the boundaries of U.S. water territories, to keep “our maritime transportation system moving safely and efficiently.” All that knowledge in service of flow. Flow, flow, flow. The flow of capital, the flow of bodies, the flow of water. Flow. Management. Flow and management. Indeed, this has been a goal of hydrography since its formalization in the very late 1700s. This is when the United Kingdom Hydrographic Office was established. By order of King George III, all preexisting hydrographic charts recorded by Royal Navy captains were collected and catalogued. All that leads to Wilson Harris, who I read once worked reluctantly as a hydrographer, surveying Guyana’s interior waters...
Certain facts stand.
South past Louisiana and Mississippi, my familial origin points, Wilson Harris surveyed Guyana’s interior waters and lands: I sensed over the years as a surveyor that the landscape possessed resonance. The landscape possessed a life because the landscape, for me, is like an open book, and the alphabet with which one worked was all around me. But it takes some time to really grasp what this alphabet is, and what the book of the living landscape is.
We go south and south and south, past Guyana’s aqueous reveals. The Meeting of Waters in Brazil provides something of an object lesson on confluence. There is the Rio Negro and the Amazon, referred to upriver as the Solimões. The two rivers meet, they share a bed and banks, but the rivers remain distinct. For six kilometers, the rivers run this way, pressing up on each other without mixing. This is a consequence of temperature, speed, density—difference.
Certain facts stand.
The flow rate at the mouth of the Amazon is such that it could fill 83 Olympic pools in one second.
And how many mouths for so much water, how much slaver and spittle, how much speech and murmur, how much spillage and seep, how many floods, how many droughts, how many springs, how much silt and soil, how many dredgings and adjustments, how much sunlight, how many freezes, how many trembles, how many stirrings, how many stones and branches, how many dams, how many roots, how much heat, how many ships and shippings, how many people, how much constraint or restraint, how many failures, how many willful misunderstandings, how deep, how many sand boils, how many reversals, how much said and said, how much sediment, how much time, how much rain, how much rain, how much rain, and what was or could be the intensity of the rain.
It bears repeating that Toni Morrison said all water has a perfect memory and is forever trying to get back to where it was. Writers are like that: remembering where we were, what valley we ran through, what the banks were like, the light that was there and the route back to our original place. It is emotional memory — what the nerves and the skin remember as well as how it appeared. And a rush of imagination is our ‘flooding’ and Terrance Hayes said likewise, one’s poetics are most evident in procedure and practice. One’s poetics should be liquid.
Certain constructions fall away.
Where I lived, near the bridge under the mall, flows the Woonasquatucket River. I heard an artist used to live there, in the mall, behind a false wall. The artist was found out and banned from the mall’s premises and now maintains his distance. Another artist used to sleep there, I heard, under the bridge, above the water in a metal cot. No one has told me what happened to her. The stone walls that hold the river banks there are cracking and falling apart. There’s no plan for repair, I hear. Now, imagine the mall tumbling in: Further along the river, the banks lose their stoneholds and the river is instead lined with soil and foliage. I walked there once with a group and all was half-lush in the waning season. There is work, said the river guide, to restore the river’s health—uprooting the so-called invasive species, making buffers between the roads and water, remediating the soil. From a bridge, we watched the flow, watched the light, watched the geese and their young. I imitated a cormorant’s wings with my elbows, flocking with the birds, then I turned to walk home alone.