Wisconfluence

Jul 30

Written By Kimberly Blaeser, Max Garland, Angie Trudell Vasquez & Catherine Young

“Water has to live. It can hear, it can sense what we’re saying. It can really, really, speak to us. Some songs come to us through the water.”

Grandmother Josephine Mandamin (Biidaasige)
Anishinaabe water protector and teacher

In all our Wisconsin contributions to the MDW Atlas, we explore the movement of natural materials across space and time. In this confluence of verse, four Wisconsin-based poets— Catherine Young, Angie Trudell Vasquez, Kimberly Blaeser, and Max Garland—respond to their watersheds and personally significant bodies of water. In experimenting with current words over our well-watered Wisconsin landscape, they voice the truths of hydrology: we are water beings, water flows and connects, water gives all life. - Curt Meine

Waterways
Catherine Young

1.
If I were to tell you about all the waters in Wisconsin, there would not be enough time in a day, month, year – or all the years of my life. 15,074 lakes; 12,600 rivers; thousands of creeks and springs, unnamed

2.
I want to say rivers in Wisconsin named Blue, Black, Red, Copper, White, Yellow, Vermillion, Teal, Evergreen; Wind, Thunder, Spirit…

and lakes in Wisconsin

Mud, Spring, Marsh, Meadow; Beaver, Bear, Pigeon, Perch, Goose, Duck,

Deer, Elk, Clam, Turtle, Otter, Owl, Loon, Eagle, Crane; Crystal, Diamond, Silver, Mirror, Sand; Cedar, Birch, Cranberry, Rice…

are intimately connected through watersheds

Fox, Wolf, Buffalo, Rock, Root, and Sugar; St. Croix, Eau Claire, Montreal LaCrosse, Brule; Kickapoo, Pecatonica, Peshtigo, Flambeau; Nemadji, Namekagon, Maquoketa, Manitowoc, Trout…

and I wonder if we were to name the waters underground
where tides rise and fall unseen, would we claim them as our own,
treat them with as much love as a treasured lake or trout stream?

3.
Wisconsin’s borders are waters:
Lake Superior, Lake Michigan, the rivers Montréal, Mississippi, St. Croix.

– but how can water be boundary? How can states and nations
be divided across waters? Lines on maps are artificial;
we hold artificial rivers in our minds – but our hearts know better.
Rivers run through heart and hand echoing rivers and lakes on land
that appear from the air as trees, branching; circulating

I wonder what the heart cannot forget, what memories
waters hold onto; what they remember of us…
child with fishing rod, beachcomber sands in hand, ice skater, paddler, diver, swimmer, drinking waters generation after generation…

4.
If I were asked to name Wisconsin’s waters, I would say Life Giving.
In each direction I turn, I see and hear water.
Invisible to me, waters seep in rock crevices, cracks, and caves beneath my feet
and rise into the air of this aqueous Earth

I would say, Let us celebrate and watch over these waters
for the maternal oceans of children to come.

Water Memory Mosaic
Angie Trudell Vasquez

Body of water
boundary waters
lace the landscape.

People moved up and down the mouths
found themselves
among the reeds, the fish, wild rice.

Mound dweller remains.

Here, see rocks stacked
how they stood on boulder dams
speared our ancestors laying eggs,
spiraling back to their birth place.

Celebrants smoke flesh at night
sing songs of praise prayers answered,
sustenance for the next season.
Fins ford the way home.

History in bones.

Our cuerpos remember I tell her
liquid memory
DNA swims in our blood
when we drink –

she, beautiful child blinks
believes me
stops running the sink.
Precious, I say
humans over seventy percent agua,
water is life,

all the wet that ever was
here now for all, and we walk
enter the lake
splash and race
this summer day
when school is out.

How vast are we in our veins?

Clepsydra
Kimberly Blaeser

i.
Water’s epic—a story on rock, a glyph.
Each high flood mark phenology—
pyrite’s ink read in drought years.

Waves swell—lap the shore, fall away.
Each rhythmic undulation (a wet fold)
speaks of infinity—a making unmaking.

Tributary, too, a container of time:
how seeping through is measure
wet body a sieve—oldest water clock.

ii.
Immersed, we who paddle or steam ziibi
zaaga’igan—waterways for blue love or profit—
float within passages older than telling.

Of sleek fur swimming, rushes woven,
manomin the good seed growing on water;
of deep—rock cavern serpents or spirits.

Underwater world of mishibizhi, clams,
fish, and broken hulls—this phantom
paradise—yes, indigo and fathoms deep.

iii.
Water canvas holds lavish paint of sky gods:
a pearling (poetry), refracted opals at sunset—
each amber light deepening to violet night.

We dream mythic, abiding cycles of nibi nations
erasing anthro—wake to water songs, aseema
sprinkled like mayfly bodies on northern lakes.

Beyond the figment of surface—hydroreality:
twisting helical flow carves, we droplets glitter
tirelessly transform—bend shape, evaporate, endure.

Bedrock
Max Garland

We gravitate toward rivers for the same reason
the rain does–kinship. Say you're standing
in the Chippewa, which is rising,

within and without. You've waded just deep
enough to feel the rush of recent rain, as well
as the reactivated will of ancient rains,

water that split the seed, found the fractures,
and infiltrated the rock, hollowing,
hallowing the valley.

Water is the namesake of this town,
its original and ongoing argument.
Eight pedestrian bridges span the rivers,

but if you think the purpose of the bridges
is to reach the other side, think again, watch
how many of us stop halfway across, lean

into the railing, and look–upriver for what
we hope might still arrive or–downstream
for what we thought was ours to keep,

but now is clearly flowing away, or already
flown, though it might linger like the sun
in long swaggering epilogues of light.

If the better part of the planet is water,
and most of the body, and the lungs
resemble sponges left over from the shallow seas

that preceded us, and the brain's natural habitat
is water, as if it were some top-heavy aquatic flower,
briefly marooned on the stalk of the spine,

is it any wonder the mind is awash with longing?

And if everything we see appears to us
through the micro-tide of saltwater and oil
sliding over the cornea, isn't this valley,

this world, always slightly submerged?

Writing about water is auto-biographical,
an ongoing memoir, constantly revised,
from the geysers of the 6th largest moon of Saturn,

to the chemical signatures of water on planets
as far as the infrared lenses of telescopes can reach.
From the swirling confluence of the local rivers

to the wellings of the human heart, which is part
of the watershed, right? Not the oldest part,
nor most enduring, but the feeling part.

The main lesson life by water teaches is that coming
and going are the constant. No hope of one without
the other, which the heart knows, of course,

but chooses to forget, though it's inscribed
in the layers of sandstone and shale, recited
by the rapids, and even quietly resonates

in the heart itself, chamber by chamber, atrium
and ventricle, like memory’s deepening echo
all the way down to bedrock.

WisconsinCurt Meine

Kimberly Blaeser, Max Garland, Angie Trudell Vasquez & Catherine Young

Kimberly Blaeser, past Wisconsin Poet Laureate, is the author of five poetry collections including Copper Yearning, Apprenticed to Justice, and Résister en dansant/Ikwe-niimi: Dancing Resistance. Blaeser edited Traces in Blood, Bone, and Stone: Contemporary Ojibwe Poetry and authored the monograph Gerald Vizenor: Writing in the Oral Tradition. A Professor at University of Wisconsin–Milwaukee and MFA faculty for Institute of American Indian Arts in Santa Fe, Blaeser is also founding director of In-Na-Po—Indigenous Nations Poets. She lives in rural Wisconsin, and for portions of each year, in a water-access cabin near the Boundary Waters Canoe Area Wilderness in Minnesota.

Max Garland is the author of The Word We Used for It, winner of the 2017-18 Brittingham Poetry Prize. Other books include The Postal Confessions, winner of the Juniper Prize for Poetry; Hunger Wide as Heaven, which won the Cleveland State Poetry Center Open Competition; and a chapbook, Apparition, from the University of Wisconsin Press. His poems, essays, stories, and interviews have appeared in journals such as POETRY, New England Review, Gettysburg Review, and many other journals, anthologies, and newspapers, as well as regularly featured on Wisconsin Public Radio. A graduate of Western Kentucky University and the Iowa Writers Workshop, Garland is a former Jay C. and Ruth Halls Poetry Fellow at the University of Wisconsin Institute for Creative Writing.

Angie Trudell Vasquez is a poet, writer, performer, and activist. She is the current City of Madison Poet Laureate. Angie received her MFA in poetry from the Institute of American Indian Arts. Her work was recently featured by Tracy K. Smith, former US Poet Laureate, on the poetry podcast The Slow Down, which is broadcast daily on Minnesota Public Radio. Most recently, Vasquez’s work has been published in Taos Journal of Poetry, Yellow Medicine Review, Raven Chronicles, The Rumpus, Cloudthroat, and the South Florida Poetry Journal. She has poems on the Poetry Foundation’s website and was a Ruth Lilly fellow while at Drake University. She was a finalist for the New Women’s Voices series in 2018, and In Light, Always Light, her third collection of poetry, was published by Finishing Line Press in May 2019. Vasquez guest edited the Spring 2019 edition of the Yellow Medicine Review with Millissa Kingbird, and co-edited the collection Through This Door (2020) with Margaret Rozga. She serves on the Wisconsin State Poet Laureate Commission as co-chair.

Catherine Young is a writer and performing artist whose work is infused with a keen sense of place. She is author of the poetry collection Geosmin (scent of soil), released in spring 2022, and the forthcoming environmental memoir Black Diamonds, Blue Flames (Torrey House Press 2023). Young worked as a national park ranger, educator, farmer, and mother before putting her heart into her writing. Her prose and eco-poetry is published in literary journals internationally and nationally, and her writing has been nominated for the Pushcart Prize and Best American Essays. Her writing has been published in the anthologies The Driftless Reader, Contours, Permanent Vacation II: Eighteen Writers on Work and Life in Our National Parks, Imagination and Place: Cartography, and is forthcoming in Essential Voices. Catherine holds degrees in Environmental Science, Physical Geography, and Education from the University of Wisconsin-Madison and an MFA in Creative Writing from the University of British Columbia. She leads writing workshops and records the weekly Landward podcast for WDRT. Rooted in farm life, Catherine lives with her family in Wisconsin’s Driftless bioregion, where she is totally in love with meandering streams. Her writings and podcasts are available at www.catherineyoungwriter.com.

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