Hold The River Banks Up

cold spring air, and a flash of color lit down from the quick sky. Jesse
turned an ear: “that’s the redwing blackbird song!” he cheered. “You’ll
never forget it now. Sweetest sound ever made by any little half robot
bird yet.” I’d heard this rough trill a thousand times but never noticed
or placed it. (A week later my neighbor would look up at his mulberry
tree suddenly flocked with red-wing blackbirds in his backyard and
reminisce: at his mother’s request, every spring migration, he would
bring out his bb gun and shoot those redwing blackbirds out of that
mulberry tree for dinner. “How did you prepare them?” I would
ask, picturing blackbird pie. “Why, we’d pan fry them!” He would
exclaim.) But yes, we walked on that levee, heard those blackbirds
trill, and continued on to the muddy end of the world. Here we
descended through that stand of willow trees lime green, twisted,
persistent. They greet the river, whether it rushes high or low, with
a pliant strength. Jesse and I walked through the rustling branches,
the shifting light, continued past all those willows to the dark tunnel
formed by pilings deep underneath the navy wharf.
We walked onward, into the dark caverns underneath the city’s river
edge, into the city’s subconscious. Little specks of light floated down
from holes in the boards high over our heads. An eerie blue glow
shone out from a portal window low along the belly of a navy ship
docked in the depths. The mud beneath our feet slowly softened,
suctioned, pulled at our steps like quicksand. An amorphous, melting
earth faced me. Under those piers, I felt my understanding of nature
shift: this earth is dark, and sucking, and unshaped, and rough.
Venomous, tremendous, rotten. This mud held up a place of spiders,
snakes, people, guns, storms, parties – all things I felt afraid of. One
patch of shimmering magma grabbed hold of my ankle with a sticky
grip and swallowed me to my thigh – my underworld baptism. The
grip of that clay like the grip of those willow roots, unearthly strong,
muscular, and pumped flush with water.
Willows are widely used for erosion control in wetlands as well as
in stream bank restoration and stabilization, short pieces of mature
stems often simply being stuck in the wet ground where they root
over winter (as live stakes). 4
Black willow grows wild along the banks of the Bogue Chitto river, up
two hours drive north of New Orleans. They straggle up from sand
banks along the floodplain, pearl out across islands, shine bright
between magnolias, maples, and elms. They feel different in this
dark-eyed landscape, their colors pale and luminescent, cool to the
touch. Have you ever seen foxfire glow silent from a fractured pine
branch at night? Have you ever touched a sleeping fish? Like leaves
of willow, those memories conjure cold green fire. Drive the highway
down the eastern edge of town in cold early spring and you’ll see
this yellow lime flame thicketing everything in sight. Spring stands
of willow address this world with a needed color. Spring stands of
willow contain vigor enough to remake land and life from pools of
watery dream.
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