Flood
Upon bended knee, those of us who survived.
The energy that to excess swells vascular life with sexual exuberance--- plenish flowering plants with the imperatives of fragrant Spring, here in hard Winter bleed evacuation & ruin.
Its force, an insurrection of weather. Two days of riotous creeks, streams & rivers running mad across our farmlands; drunk with gravity & embolden by a rising tide, till the untempered bearing is spent; the flood plain is ravished; the watershed rent & exhausted & furies of rain abandon alien fields to flee downstream to the receding sea.
Most animals fear flooding. I suspect they are sensible to the gathering force; able to reason what comes in the wind. Those that can, defy gravity's suasion: they climb above or they fly. Upon the corrugated tin that skins my house I found hundreds of spiders clinging just beyond reach of the angry rhetoric: water well past its bank & across several acres of field, flowing fast & deep & almost to the floor-level of where I live. Elsewhere, a gopher snake stretched out between two trees lashed by river & wind. Some of those who perished made decisions no different from those who survived---the difference sometimes lies in the land.
Since Gravity favors no locale, flood waters gain character & behavior by the scape & use of land & what lives on it. Free from the untamed industries of h. sapien, animals can figure a history of flooding into their native reasoning. Conceive emergency measures & bind them to succeeding generations. But our activities profoundly reset the entire watershed, undoing the instruction of past events--- bringing uncertainty & question to the informing narratives of ancestral remembrances. Communities can become unmoored & made desperate by their ignorance.
Upstream from us, those whose homes are in a trailer park (more than once unmoored) built a flood wall as might a feudal lord construct a moat to make pause barbarian invaders raining the countryside. A result of this medieval defiance is that excess water flows now in novel manners--- deadly currents reaching animals unprepared upon ground known to be innocent of swells. Each day, as our interests generate new disturbances, those who share this earth with us grow more ignorant. Persist for millennia, and animals who adapt & survive will resonant with human-ness: able to thrive amid the complexities of our settlements, but unprepared for the sustaining wilderness, that will, one day again, gain both power & ascendancy.
When sanity returned and I was able to venture out into the muck, I found exhaustion (and death) everywhere. Trees who thrive in flood regimes bent almost to the ground and covered in waste. Entire portions of the valley stripped of all its duff. The ground scored & bare. Ephemeral lakes with plebeians of the river now refugees doomed to swim out their last days searching for a way back home.
The Perished remained but for a few days. They rested upon the earth with one striking similarity: I am not sure how to put this except to say their death opened out--- a kind of honesty to their ending, almost as if they were proud to have been the body that now is being gently tugged & pulled down into the dirt.
All of us will have our last day on earth, but I imagine the expiration to be tight fisted, a contraction inward due to progressive organ failure & a presence of pain. A communal collapsing in--- not a dark flowering upon.
The Perished have this "feeling" about them that suggests something of the way we are when our prayers are spent, our hearts heavy with suffering, but from bended knee we rise & open ourselves up to the uncertain peace, to the surviving enthusiasm & the restless splendors
of being.
