Poetry

pixabay photo

By

David Wyman

Evaporating Rivers

A river like a series of echoing

syllables, its greenish

gray stench, a city of blank

stares and a cause shaped

as a media narrative, back

when it was legal to dump

sewage and industrial waste

into rivers and

light them on fire.

A pre-industrial

vision turning sludge-filled

flows (oxygen-starved,

biologically dead) into clear

waters full of fish, turtles, mink,

otters, ospreys, increasing

property values—

a wild and scenic destination

promoting the power

to create change. We had become

consumers of ecological

miracles, planet-healers…

Now in a time when the movement

‘lacks a unifying cause’

rivers are evaporating. Experts

are predicting water wars,

a future of scarcity. The World—

this is your card, here, but

reversed, meaning an end

to a cycle of life, tectonic

shifts. Lastly, an image of gasping

fish flip-flopping in hot mud—

Unlike Words We Use To Speak To Babies

Hours are painted in glass.

Where we hedge our futures.

As Henry A Giroux said

(on Moyers) ‘it’s business

that really rules us now.’ —We’re

talking about falling in love

very fast, we’re talking

to neutralize risk, we’re

talking about commercial

media directing

our life goals. (Try

to clean up the blue

one piece at a time.)

Or about hippies, UFOs, Elon

Musk, AI, how the Koch

machine launders ideas

to a chirping public, where

the day’s official transcript

gets redacted

in the celestial quiet

of TV. No, the tiger

that would eat you, it says,

hides a complexity

you don’t need to know—

only staying connected

is what matters to them

making them totemic.

David Wyman

David Wyman’s first collection of poems, Proletariat Sunrise, was published in 2017 by Kelsay Books. His poems have appeared or are forthcoming in The Aurorean, BlazeVOX, Clockwise Cat, Picaroon Poetry, The Voices Project, Dissident Voice, A Certain Slant, The Wallace Stevens Journal, Old Crow Review, Spout and Green Hills Literary Lantern among other publications.