A River Within Reach

On the upper Chichester, under a low bridge, the river runs in easy strides over polished stones of green and tan, black and deepest brown. Gazing down into this clear current—drawn to it as if my body were a dowsing rod—a tingling begins in the soles of my feet, and it migrates through me, a correspondence unmuddied by thought, between the unbound stream beneath me and my watery constitution. I’ve a longing to be lost in the river, to become another arm of its being. This river, not far from its source in the Barringtons—which command the skyline to the northwest—is on the one hand a distillation of place and, on the other hand, it’s ceaseless movement an exquisite embodiment of life as unending pilgrimage.

For some years I’ve imagined poetry’s beginnings as a river—the stream of books I read, and the currents running beneath the lines I make. More than a metaphor, this sense of poetry as a river is a matter of trusting the whole-of-being sense that prefigures thought, a felt sense for those numinous threads of knowing that poets hope they might translate for the page.

I remember a time, when the 737 carrying me home surfed a turbulent cumulonimbus like a kayak pitched about by whitewater. My face pressed to the window, I got to thinking about how a river begins, and where it ends.

Rain beats a rivered tempo

on my roof. Any body of

water has many mothers.

If we count me and you as part

of this infinity—why

then, do we only claim the one?

In spring and summer, a nor’easter blows in off the south arm of the river. When it arrives I open my windows so that it might grace my home. The breeze is a lover of salty exhalations, of the egret’s slow high-step on the mud flats at low tide, and of the ruined scent of axle grease thick on the tracks that guide cargo-weary cranes from ship to ship. It freshens my day.

The footings of my house are brick piers. There are forty-two of them not counting those beneath the back deck. They stand on alluvial deposits forsworn by the river; deep and loamy, this soil once lay beneath native grasslands and islands of she-oaks. Country managed lightly, sung into being by the Awabakal30—where, for an inconceivably long time, they fattened kangaroos and tended fields of yam daisy. I picture a vast patchwork in flower, a flux of yellow—a dying constellation’s evanescent burst of colour.

On the flats by the river, on this plumb-bob level land—with a branch line nearby—Broken Hill Propriety Ltd (BHP)opened a steelworks in 1915. What a complex: coke ovens, two blast furnaces dispensing fiery streams and plumes of ash, and a slab-sided roll shop which could house a jumbo jet. Today the admin building stands unused and circled by chain-lock fencing; in soviet style, it still gives nothing away.

Eighty years of steel-making

by the river—molten ingots

three shifts a day. A black talc

settled in each roof ’s void—it slips

through my ceiling boards. Caulk them

with No More Gaps; it’s gone away.

Back then, fly-ash turned clean

washing black, and smouldered in workers’

lungs too—their deaths foretold

by coal. My neighbour, a foundry-man,

was taken to hospital

last Monday—he’ll never come home.

This neighbour of mine told me of how he drilled down for the water table, that his bore spike pulled clean and clear at nine metres. The avocado tree in my yard—of the Shepard variety—must draw water from way down too, because it supports a spreading crown, and most years bears a healthy crop in March and April. Seamus Heaney writes that poetry is the work of divination, of getting “in touch with what is there, hidden and real,” of “going outside of normal cognitive bounds”, to “raid the inarticulate”. Informed by him, I sometimes picture poetry’s beginnings in the sweet water that percolates into a well, that I’m dipping into the cool darkness of an underground reservoir.

According to the French philosopher Gaston Bachelard the English word riv-er has “a sonorous brutality” a masculine tone and rhythm that lacks the ability to communicate the nature of water flowing. The French word for a river that runs to the sea is riv-i-e-re—four syllables and a feminine noun of imagination that flows as you speak it, that resonates in your chest, and then skips lightly off the tip of your tongue. A word with vulnerability and power.

I came across an aerial photograph of BHP when it was running at full tilt in the 1960s. It looks like a city under bombardment, a battlefield shrouded in swirling clouds of dark smoke, punctured here and there by tall columns of steam pumped from chimney stacks. The earth around it is an aching wound. It speaks of a certain kind of masculinity—and I’m thinking here of the institution, not the working people who held jobs there—that cluster of attitudes and habits that inform a man who perpetrates domestic violence, who’s indifferent to the pain he inflicts on his loved ones in pursuit of his needs, and when an attempt is made to hold him to account, will deny responsibility for the damage his actions and neglect have caused. In fact, he believes that in being confronted, he’s the victim.

Chlorides for pickling steel, slag

of lead, mercury and manganese

were a few of the toxic

metals bound for the bottom, and

its dwellers. I’ll still eat

the river’s prawns; they taste so sweet.

For several decades after the closure of the steel plant, the site remained an unremediated wasteland. I went there often, ignoring the signs that warned of contamination, and wandered around like the kid I once was, charmed by broken bits of machinery, abandoned buildings, wattles groves and pampas grass. I found solitude there, it was the kind of place I could set aside worries, and more.

Gutted cars and the empty

buildings in this forgotten

lot by the river. I go

there to cauterize my sorrows;

there’s comfort in the company

of the soiled and the ruined.

When I reflect on the river and the breadth of its catchment, I can’t escape the thought that my life—and the scope of my writing—would be better for travelling more widely than I do. I think of the revered haiku poet Basho who gave up his house and his possessions to wander northern Japan in the last ten years of his life. When I seek guidance on this matter from that deeper part of me that inspires poetry, ask it whether I should take to the road or not, it naturally enough answers on the side of Basho. A river’s course is a mind made up by water’s motion and the terrain it passes through; and life is something like that. I might stay put in a quiet backwater, but all the while the source that set me moving urges me on, says run from this lie, lean into the bend before me.