Writing the Wabash River

a photo from the personal archives of Dr. James Gammon, a house on the bank somewhere between Darwin Ferry and Merom. What would you write about this house?

Write it in the comments….

I’m finalizing plans for my Wabash workshops now, and I’m talking with a lot of great people around the state. More soon.

Bulbs are shooting up green everywhere. In our yard today, two tulips bloomed. The daffodils have been open for a few days, but in the Deam Wilderness, they bloom a little later because of the dense canopy–even in March.

Here’s a prose poem about daffodils from my Dream Wilderness chapbook from Finishing Line Press. This seems more uplifting than my poems on global warming.

To Daffodils in the Wilderness
Late, long blooms slowed by the pines’ shade, you mark houses foreclosed and burned, cellars half-filled. On these ridge tops, the pines mark the extent of fields and pasture, and I can’t help but scheme where the pigs were kept, the milk cow, where the barn sat, where the best field was.

But you always tag the house, a porch, broken brick gateposts, the wagon track. You’ve propagated for eight decades, poisonous bulbs fending off rodents. Early June, your petals have perspired their narcotic scent. The coronas have collected pollen—the pistils swell—and dumb me with their stark yellow.

Jonquils or Narcissus—my grandmother’s names, all bastardized from taxonomy—you cache this place’s last memory before pines and erosion control. How long did the farmer stare at his failing land as the rain runoff eroded its way back from ridge edge and ate the brown dirt of his best bearing field? When did the gullies grow so deep that he could stand in them? How long did he stare at the gullies’ sides and see his own failure?

Another Indiana beauty–and another current obssession:

Glad to see this documentary coming out. This area south of Lake Michigan in Indiana had some of the highest biodiversity in North America before we ditched and dredged and channelled and logged and destroyed it all.

The more I see old maps of northern Indiana, the more I realize we live in what was once a river of trees and limestone.

A couple weeks back, I went to visit Seven Pillars along the Mississinewa River, a sacred site for the Miami Indians. I drove from Marion, where my wife grew up and where her mother still lives, along the Frances Slocum Trail and the reservoir.

Random thoughts:

1. tributary
2. Miami’s sacred place, their last place
3. Surprised it hasn’t been strip-mined or flooded
4. limestone, luminscent
5. banks of limestone
6. forgot my camera, took some photos with my phone before it died
7. gray water
8. You should read Jared Carter. I should read more of him.
9. limestone cliffs twenty or thirty feet high
10. trash
11. cedars growing in crevices in the limestone
12. rooms and grottos
13. ACRES Land Trust
14. A 2′x2′ lid to a metal safe
15. Peru, where the Mississinewa dumps into the Wabash
16. Peru, where Cathy Day is from, the place that inspired The Circus in Winter
17. Peru, where Circus Lane is down the road from the cemetery where the last Miami War Chief, Francis Godfroy, is buried
18. The dam for the Mississinewa Reservoir seems entirely too large
19. Carter’s poem Mississinewa Reservoir
20. Near Marion, War of 1812 battlefields, where the Miami and other tribes began to feel the final push for removal
21. LaFountaine and Fabulous 105

At the IMA 100 Acres last week, I read poems covering Big Walnut Creek, Wabash River, and White River. My White River poem was about Oliver’s Woods, site of Central Indiana Land Trust ‘s headquarters.

I also read my poem about the Miami Indian word for river, Siipiiwi. Check out David J. Costa’s linguistic work in  The Miami-Illinois Language and his ongoing work with the Myaamia Project. I’m ordering myaamia neehi peewaalia aacimoona neehi aalhsoohkaana: Myaamia and Peoria Narratives and Winter Stories now. Video below.

Siipiiwi
-the Miami Indian word for river

River, río, riparian—who first spoke “Ri”
at a large flowing expanse of water
and understood the response?
In vulgar Latin or Old French,
how did water say water?
how did eddy say eddy?
Every Gaul and Roman uttered “Ri”
as fields creeped closer to banks
and trees disappeared.

The Miami knew untouched rivers,
the Waa-paah-siki, the Bright White River,
not this silted, polluted flow.
They knew the Kingfisher’s call,
the heron’s spearing bill,
the trolling pike and muskellunge
in the clear water,
the limestone bottoms’ gurgle,
and they knew the river water lapped against
rooted and tangled banks, shaded—siipiiwi.

first published in Alehouse 2009

Welcome to my blog site for the Wabash River Poetry Project, which is funded through an Individual Artist Grant by the Indiana Arts Commission. During my project this year, I’ll be visiting areas along the Wabash River and writing about them. Mostly poems, but I’m sure some essays and stories will come out of this, too. And I want to bring my friends (or they’ve already invited themselves along).

So I want this site to be about my work as well as the groups, natural areas, cities, towns, people, writers, and artists I encounter along the way. So I hope to have guest posts from all along the Wabash River.