from Holy Red River, Flow
Without exchanging words we reached a place
where a narrow stream came gushing from the woods
(its reddish water still runs fear through me!)…
— Dante, Canto XIV, Inferno
The other shore is right here, forgive and forget, protect and reassure.
— Jack Kerouac, Sutra 36, The Scripture of the Golden Eternity.
4.
Red river gushing up gull-like at the Pacific estuary sails away incarnadine
flows to the red skies over China, holy red river flow in me
postindustrial rust heaps flow red to shore-lines of Nanjing, Connecticut
over the red scare of Virgil speaking to Dante across the sin river
but Jesus speaks sutras
beaten down in red signs
5.
Writing down years writing down the red fear
by the Naugatuck River greeny flow of the heart attack
machines years and years, your red banner flow
homeland is waning astray, what flow of worker blood
do you wanhope hope to charge by the Chase Brass & Copper mills
gone mill miming channel to express the deeper red river flow
to China, Wyoming, and Bangladesh
10.
The swollen Red River snakes … into Minnesota like an S
it flows northward through the Red River Valley flowing upward to Manitoba draining into Lake Winnepeg like an S
scrambling the borders of states and best laid plans of line
sandbagging the torrents like an S
Red River goes on rising across the levies like an S
sparsely populated until Ojibwe claims to the most fertile portions
of the valley were extinguished
as the Old Crossing
Red River of the North, to distinguish it from the Red River
of the Texas/Oklahoma border
snowfalls and floods
paleofloods,
unmanageable river
swollen Red River snakes through Fargo, North Dakota, and Moorhead
Interstate 94 swallowed
water management
flood control from the air measuring ice thicknesses
aerial imagery of the snake
weeping over the body of Kim Jong-Il on the Red River Radio station
“Hundreds of thousands of North Koreans wept and wailed as they lined the major streets of Pyongyang Wednesday despite heavy snow as a hearse S, carrying the body of Kim Jong Il, his casket draped in red flags, passed through the capital in a solemn funeral ceremony.”
…for the Red River in the north and the Mekong River in the south
gold-red sunset, where tide and river meet in a red mist
when the Red River was sold to the Canadian government
inflicted on the people a land survey that ignored the river lot system, alienating people from riverine ways of life, S
spoke of the link between water and people:
I see within the round of that shield the peaks of the Western Mountains and the crests of the Eastern waves — the winding Assiniboine, the five-fold lakes, the St. Lawrence, the Ottawa, the Saguenay, the St. John, and the Basin of Minas — by all these flowing waters in all the valleys they fertilize, in all the cities they visit in their courses, I see a generation of industrious, contented, moral men, free in name and in fact, — men capable of maintaining, in peace and in war, a Constitution worthy of such
a country…
14.
Always remembering the childbirth and red glory afternoons
delivered by the polluted
earths of Lowell, Kerouac Rinpoche being born
again, by the Red River singing again of concord
along the merry-mack trucks drunken with labors and death
the traveler born again on the road
“Holy Red River, Flow” offers a world-brooding serial poem wrought from ex-ecopoetics in which industrial watersheds of Connecticut and California (where I grew up and was remade) are overlain with red rivers of North Dakota, Minnesota, and China; communist red, the red of Dante’s inferno, and the love-red muses and poets of Emerson’s Oversoul, Kerouac and the Beat Jesus, and Dylan’s folk songs are made to speak to one another, across “flow” states.
Selecting and juxtaposing language in some modest act of will and (as Robert Pinsky once put it to me) quiet intelligence, the poetic state insinuates itself and moves on. At the far extremity of language-deformation and quest, “I write in order to abolish the play of subordinate operations in myself” (Bataille): to write beyond my self into another language and place of perpetual becoming where languages of lyric dispossession seem an act of grace, flow, and sudden finding.
Rob Sean Wilson has published poems and reviews in Bamboo Ridge and Tinfish and various other journals from Manoa to New Republic, Ploughshares, Partisan Review, Poetry, and Jacket. He is a western Connecticut native who was educated at the University of California at Berkeley, where he was founding editor of the Berkeley Poetry Review in 1974. He has published a book of mixed poetry and prose with Mineumsa Press/University of Hawai’i Press called Waking In Seoul. His study Be Always Converting, Be Always Converted: An American Poetics appeared with Harvard University Press and was a Choice Outstanding Academic Title for 2009. A Chinese translation of his serial poem When the Nikita Moon Rose will appear in Malaysia and Taiwan and a set of Hawai’i-based poems will be part of a forthcoming “Euro-American poetries” anthology being edited by Susan Schultz. He lives and works in Santa Cruz, California—writing on the edges of all this transpacific beatitude and “busy being reborn.”