sophiewonfor

a fish in thawing water,

thaw, the relaxing of frozen things, what felt unable to shift finds a sense of total sublimation, becoming, transforming, from what was opaque and concrete, in response to far more beads of sweat is thaw, then, the environment’s release of angst? letting itself melt by an inexact, messy and revealing melt. pooling at its own feet, a melting glacier is far greater than the collection on the eaves of the house but can we listen to both just as intently? doesn’t this, their way of speaking share a common slip of the tongue, even as the gravity of what they are releasing after all this time, a hundred of hundreds of years later, the sounds of ice terrify and lull, surround, water fills the bath as we sleep, it pours over the topmost edge, smoothed by years maybe but more certainly by tears, these pool. they prove a change, a transforming, toward the moment afterward, though for now, there is within and without access or inaccess to water, to the changing change of seasons, there is still for now the thaw, the smell of it, te water in the river, snow on its bank, how else to address the settler in my identity than to address and reach toward the place i am from, and what of this attempt to take a piece with me, to re-root this willow, how does this impulse reveal my attitude? there is a well, and at the bottom of it there are a few stones, saying (and how my grandfather the geologist would laugh about stones carrying words) something profoundly bruised and hidden, an iridescent blue-gray, a polished meteorite, somewhere between labradorite and graphite, these stones at the bottom, what is left behind as the thaw brings up what we pushed down, what’s been frozen for centuries, comes raining down or else cry it out after, knowing nothing is fixed, knowing nothing is permanent, the way i imagine my grandparents held onto their beliefs, that they were certain, but mostly i am guessing and hope to act in the way of a thaw, to see our complicitness, our ways of belonging cannot be fixed, i’m thinking about, the thaw, the way a chinook sweeps through, i’m thinking about the full moon about to pass (by the time you are reading this it has) and about contribution, how i don’t want to be an academic so much as a gardener, but then i think of how that is not necessarily in sustainable relationship to the land, how planting seeds from elsewhere can be an agressive act of claiming and settling stolen land, but then i’m interested in gardening for the reason of encouraging growth, to connect others to growing things, to inspire appreciation where it lacks because it is through growing things we have our greatest connection, so through the presence of willow from where i was born, how it has a natural rooting hormone which is meant to encourage other things around it to grow, so for this if i was going transplant it i care that it could be with water it would be familiar with, could rooting this piece of willow be an act of connection through growth? i lack stories to connect me to the water, the land, the stones, or rather only those as my parents made them up into our own mythology, and what about water? that is everything, that it is life, then what of this stream of consciousness, of the melt of the snow which fell by the river i know as the elbow, before being swallowed by the weir and pumped to fill the lake called chestermere, after brushing with particles of ash and bitumen in the air, in the fish, the water of there, so what about bringing that here, to the place of another watershed, is this extraction or a treasuring of the specificity of this water, i smell the thaw and i think of the complexity of water, how much it holds, glacial or polluted, i think of the water samples brought to MP offices to prove a point, i think of the vocabulary of a watershed moment, what it means to let such movement carry out beneath our feet, and this is just an attempt to release something, to be transparent, to interrogate my own views, my histories whether i understand them or not, and true, largely it is a crevasse, a fissure and i see water trickles in and that is the well the lives i came from, in the place where i am from, there is a glacier called athabasca, there are two rivers in the city called calgary, the glaciers are in the mountains feeding these and these became the sites of national parks in the twentieth century, not long after my grandmother would be crowned banff ski queen while the stoney were excluded from their traditional territories, while the athabasca chipeywan were pushed out of the parks, i wonder how my ancestors thought of this, of the treaty 7 which was an agreement to share the land with the Blackfoot, the Stoney, the Tsuut’ina peoples, an agreement to share, but then the parks were created and made exclusive, this is all in the smell of the thaw, an ache in the earth, the sun on the straw, willow has a power to heal aches i have heard, what about the ache of how detached i feel when i think of how my grandfather, my father, helped find the oil for extraction, how my cousins raise cattle in the south near the lakes called waterton, how i always wanted to leave that place i grew up and belong somewhere else, all that this place means, so now, here is some piece, and here is the smell of that thaw and if hope is grounded in memory, could hope even be in the river downstream, after its been rung through millions of faucets and garden hoses and flushed thoughtlessly, still water holds onto life enough to provide it, this is not a statement so much as a stream

april 2018

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bibliography

“hope is grounded in memory,” rebecca solnit,
https://onbeing.org/programs/rebecca-solnit-falling-together/

treaty 7,
https://www.aadnc-aandc.gc.ca/eng/1100100028789/1100100028791

water samples delivered to MPs,
http://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/british-columbia/multimedia/pipeline-opponents-make-special-delivery-to-mp-s-office-1.4591224

exclusion of first nations from national parks,
https://thetyee.ca/Life/2012/08/04/Canadas-Five-Best-Parks/