After the storm

October 19, 1980

The sun glistens across the river from the falls to the foot of the bridge – so bright it stings my eyes and makes me look elsewhere, bright but not warm enough to remove the chill of the wind last night’s storm left or restore the leaves left homeless under the relentless rain.

Gulls cruise the blue sky eyeing the rain elevated shores, the grass near the top still glistening from the west even as the water recedes, testifying to the onslaught the river suffered.

It always recovers and its beleaguered citizens always return, geese floating near my side, ducks in the shallows on the Clifton side. Some even linger near the lip of the falls, floating near the glistening edge as they hunt for food.

None of my human friends share the river with me today – no fishing lines spread web-like from the sides of the bridge, no old men gathered behind the Service Diner to smoke and gossip.

Colored leaves continue to flutter from the tree limbs with each gust – red and yellow snow destined to turn brown after a time in the bright, bleaching light. The most solid green is fixed on the far side where a stand of pines pokes up from some hill well beyond the river, a boasting from a breed less subject to the fickle whims of the seasons.

For some reason, I ache for winter this year, like I have rarely done before, perhaps because I hope real snow will wash away the summer dust lack of rain left inside of me.

I am always amazes how affected I am by this place, feeling the pain of this river and the changes it undergoes, feeling it flow through me as if my blood, my feet still moist from the first time I set food here at three or four or five, not this part, but that curved part that circles the City of Paterson like a crown, me asking my mother at the time why the water was brown and not blue, and she telling me simply: “That’s the way it is,” while I still ask the same question all these years later.

Relieving the drought in me

October 11, 1980

            It rains with rage, uproarious anger slapping at the sun-baked ground so nothing absorbs at first, bubbling water rushing down the river back to cut deep wounds in its side.

            The rain drops batter the leaves above me, leaves that offer me only temporary refuge before I know I will become soaked.

            On the dock and nearby slabs of concrete, the rain hits so hard it sizzles as if hot, flushing out the six foot balls so that they look like falls again after a long summer’s trickle.

            Below it, the gush strikes the river stones with fury, as the sky above cracks with flashes of lightning and rumbles with the roaring thunder, the sky coughing up the dry phlegm the drought left as rain stirs dust into mud at my feet.

            Each leaf-clogged gully fills with clear water, which pushing down tiny dams left by twigs and litter, and these finally flow into the ravished slow water eddied below, stirring them up like stew.

            I see no catfish now or carp. Yet I can feel their stirring out from under the deeper mud to which they had taken refuge during the worst part of the drought.

            The whole thing is as intoxicating as wine, wet air felling my lungs to replace the dry air I have spent the summer breathing, flushing out the dust from me the way the gushing gullies do from the river bank.

            Even the arches of the bridge look more dignified now that water has risen to cover the brown stains at their shins.

            Old men huddle under the overhang of Service Diner’s roof to stare out at the riving river upstream, the puff of their expelled cigarette smoke foreshadowing the frosted breath each will breathe when this season finally changes into the next and the river at our feet turns to ice.

            Suddenly, in celebration of this renewed world, silver fish leap out of the brown surface of deeper water, entertaining the dusk and geese who have already fed on cracked corn near the bridge, too sated to worry about eating – yet.

            Something dark stirs in the brittle reeds on the far side of the reed, too remote in the still dim light for me to make out.

            I sip my coffee and wait for the worst of the downpour to pass, a mere formality since I cannot get much wetter than I already am, glad for the rain that some relieves the drought in me as well.

When does the drought end?

I never saw the islands here

Hidden from me in the mists

Though I have wandered here often

Seeking solice at the river side

I can find no where else

I always the roots

Buried deep into the banks

Like desperate fingers clinging

To the last of soil

Before fate or some other force

Swept them away

My own fingers aching

With a similar attempt

At clinging to a life

That has buried me as deep.

It is the drought

That dredges up the hidden things,

Shows the detritus deep water

Disguised

My mind full of broken bottles

And rusted tin cans

And a small trickle of hope

Between them

I hear the squawk of ducks and geese

As if inside my head

Landlord and debt collectors

Pecking at me

For what I cannot give,

I feel as crowded

As the striped bass

Caught in the shrinking pools

Easy pickings to the perpetual

Pecks of savage beaks,

Me and they

Wondering

If and when

The drought

Might end.

Slithering things in the slimy green

July 2, 1982

It is a sweltering July day with tall grasses on either side of the river gone pale from lack of rain.

The carp dabble at the roots near the shore while lazy turtles bask in sun light on the backs of rotten logs, exposed by the unusually shallow water.

Frustrated ducks swim from shore to shore in water so muddy it might as well be mud, while overhead gulls scream in their desperate search for food.

And I stand in the middle of the bridge staring down in my own desperate attempted to make sense of it all.

I cross this same bridge even in my dreams, my reality distorted by the reflected water, strange shapes stirring under the surface I can’t quite make out.

Many things I’ve not seen before appear, especially near the foot of the bridge, slimy uncomfortable things without legs that sliver up to the surface of the muck for a moment then vanished again to resurface elsewhere.

Even the carp tend to avoid these places, content to make their livelihood nearer the shore, feeding at the roots of reeds or tr4ees or off the gifts from god tossed off the bridge by speeding motorists.

The gulls won’t even feed off the slivering slimy creatures of the deep, veering away suddenly after they have mistakenly plunged towards them mistaking them for something wholesome.

Perhaps the carp, gulls and geese know about these deep beasts when I do not, having learned hard lessons about the poisons they bear from having fed off them or the poisonous green slime of the chemical plant pipes out of which such creatures have evolved.

Sometimes, staring down, I shiver even in this heat and ache to wake up the way I used to ache as a kid when caught in a nightmare, needing to shed my life of these dark dreams, ridding the river of its questionable fluids and its constantly dripping pipes of green to beautify my life, even when I know down deep it can’t be.

I ache for the water to rise again, to cover over all this so I can stare at a surface unmarred by slithering creatures and unstained by evil green.

Pure water?

Sunday, June 16, 2013

I always seek water when I feel this way, when I lose faith and struggle against the encroachment of evil – those dark shapes that loom at the edge of my way of life and seek perpetually to devour me.

Sometimes, even those who pretend to be good scare me.

I keep thinking of those scenes from Harry Potter where supposedly good angels suck out the souls of bad, sometimes taking the souls of the innocent.

Lately, however, I have learned how few good guys there are, and how often evil feeds on evil, and hurts good people in their schemes to get ahead.

Growing up near one of the most polluted rivers in American, I learned that life goes on even there, and that those forced to live in that world often have to make bad choices to survive, wildlife feeding on polluted wildlife in order to stay alive, polluted inside and out.

There are signs along some of the rivers that say don’t eat the fish or crabs, as if many poor people have a choice, faced between dying of cancer later or starvation now. For some the polluted water is all they have, and must settle for lust of power rath3er than love of life.

The signs, however, are meant for those of us who delude ourselves into believing we are less polluted than those who openly feed here. Those who are as pure as all that are dangerous, wandering into this world without knowing the rules. They are house fish let loose on the presumption that they can some how survive in a world where big fish eat small, when they have never seen a big fish and have always been hand fed.

The real problem comes with people like me, who have power, and dislike it, who believe in justice and fair play and who – despite being flawed – like our lives with one fundamental belief to never, ever let evil win, even if justice can’t win either.

But I also live by another belief that no river is so polluted that it can never become clean again, and I still retain faith that when it does, I can myself off the filth of this world and become pure again – if no less flawed.

A good place to die?

August 4, 1980

The fishermen point out the place where my uncle took the plunge. So bent on self destruction even the guard rail could not hold him back, pushing his pale green carpenter’s van into the body of the river like a splinter.

When the police and emts rushed into the water from behind Service Diner to save him, he fought them off.

He did not want to be saved.

My uncle knows the shores of this river better than I ever will, having grown up on its bangs, an early river rat, a tough teen who had to fight his way through the Garfield gangs from Lodi to get his share.

He knows the weak places along this river, the places were a determined man can find death in a rush, and thought he’d found his niche in a weak piece of rail, gunning his engine across the parking lot the way he once did ho rods along River Drive as a kid. Then, he struck wood and metal and through, his van becoming airborne despite the accumulation of saws and drills and lumber he had collected inside. And for a moment, when the stony bank fell out from under the undercarriage and wheels, he flew – crash landing with a splat on the flat surface a dozen yards upriver from the falls.

I do not know if he intended for the current to carry him over the brink. He won’t say although he still mumbles about how his truck betrayed him by getting stuck in the mud.

He is no fisherman like his father and brothers are – too agitated even as a boy to watch fishing floats bob on the surface of the water until some invisible species decides to bit. But he loved the water, coming to these shores ache day the way I do, if not to pray then to find something he could not find in other places, amid the piles of old docks and crumbling old paper mills, reeds rubbing shoulders with him like old friends.

Never welcome even in the old neighborhood where each day required him to fight for every inch of progress, he came here, stumbling over rocks and roots, up one bank to cross the bridge to do the same on the other bank, swimming in summer in the polluted waters of the Dundee Canal, slaking on its surface when a deep freeze sealed it while the rest of the river continued to rumble nearby.

Why he decided to die here, he won’t say – nor can any of the fishermen who watched it unfold, most of them knowing him as a local carpenter, many aware of how much he loved wood, the feel of it against his blistered fingers, the small of it when he cut it open with a saw. He learned the craft from his father, who built many of the houses along the Bergen County side of the river.

I don’t love wood as much as he does, but I love this river, the barn swallows swirling around my head, the carp and the catfish stirring the water at my feet. I ache from climbing up and down these banks, grabbing branches and trucks to keep my balance. This is life to me, not death. So I struggle to make sense of why he needed to die here, why when the police reached him he beat them off with the same two fists he needed as a boy to even get here – tow truck pulling out his work van long after the police dragged him to shore, he dripping this water as if blood.

The fishermen tell me this tale over and over again, as if my uncle was the big fish they saw caught, the exaggeration growing with each retelling, some of the tale-tellers knowing who I am, most not, all in love with the tall tale more than they ever loved the man with me loving man and river, and hating the idea of choosing between them, life over death, seeing this place as a place of living, and now, as a place of dying, too.

Visions of 8th Street

Nov. 14, 1988

The old street bleeds rivulets of red from beds of brown leaves piled at my feet. The chill ache of coming winter is not yet cool enough to create ice, except in me -- the pain of changing seasons I can’t control, no heat switch to turn off or on, the whim of weather, the altered leaves losing their color so all seems brown or red, that excess summer, that passionate heat, only a memory, lost with the dying season, a deception Indian summer paints on this canvas to deceive the unwary, those foolish enough to believe cold is hot and heat can be rekindled from the ashes after so much has passed since first blush, and even the memory is a lie, that what once was is worth what will be, that what was ever was what it seemed, green leaves fluttering under a furious sky, a lie only the most foolish believe, this time of year when winter’s cold breathes its deceptive breath heavily upon me, this street filled with bleeding leaves, withering trees, the gray sky with its huff and pull the only truth I see, until spring once again proves me wrong.