A report, in the form of a long poem, on the author\u27s participation in the 5th annual Tar Sands Healing Walk, organized by the Athabasca Chipewyan First Nation, in Fort McMurray Alberta

Collis, Stephen S

English

Wilfrid Laurier University

The GooseVolume 13 | No. 2 Article 372-27-2015Reading Wordsworth in the Tar SandsStephen S. CollisSimon Fraser UniversityPart of the Critical and Cultural Studies Commons, Literature in English, North AmericaCommons, Nature and Society Relations Commons, Place and Environment Commons, and thePoetry CommonsFollow this and additional works at / Suivez-nous ainsi que d’autres travaux et œuvres:https://scholars.wlu.ca/thegooseThis article is brought to you for free and open access by Scholars Commons @ Laurier. It has been accepted for inclusion in The Goose by anauthorized editor of Scholars Commons @ Laurier. For more information, please contact scholarscommons@wlu.ca.Cet article vous est accessible gratuitement et en libre accès grâce à Scholars Commons @ Laurier. Le texte a été approuvé pour faire partie intégrantede la revue The Goose par un rédacteur autorisé de Scholars Commons @ Laurier. Pour de plus amples informations, contactezscholarscommons@wlu.ca.Recommended Citation / Citation recommandéeCollis, Stephen S.. "Reading Wordsworth in the Tar Sands." The Goose, vol. 13 , no. 2 , article 37, 2015,https://scholars.wlu.ca/thegoose/vol13/iss2/37.Reading Wordsworth in the Tar Sands  We were walkers In a dangerous time Of storm and thaw Took damage in our Stride—the vacant Air the wildered mind Ensnares—beat down And scraped clean  Of the burden  Of overwhelming being—    10 A voice here  Intervenes as if a Common property of the Formality of these lines— The new garden relieves The overburden of Merely growing things Scrapes the earth clean Of organism—dirty paint From used palettes scraped—   20 The new garden the voice Proclaims—is a desart Of ordered destructions An extraction earth From which bitumen’s ripped To fuel a mind from which Finance life has stripped  Wordsworth—I feel you too! Though there is no mechanism To nuance this conversation   30 Across the years—so I brought Your ruined cottages your Evening walks and Grasmere Homing here to the Tar Sands To stroll across northern desarts 1Collis: Reading Wordsworth in the Tar SandsPublished by / Publié par Scholars Commons @ Laurier, 2015Not knowing how well you fit— The method of our walking From seeing to contemplating To remembering—is yours Though no solitary haunts    40 Are here—no birds that scud The flood—here we tread Together the shadowy ground Bright in the sun round The darkest pits of vacancy Scooped out sockets of eyes Where skeletal holes of earth remain Waterless and drained  1  The place from which I looked The plane descending on Fort   50 McMurray or the road we walked Around the bounds of one dry lake And if I thought I thought of dying Of stone and tombs and pits No profit but one thought The lot of others could be mined Yet—aerial—we might business Halt—tempting notions—wind Over dead water—I thought of Clouds where none lay land    60 Grey billows of moneyed dust Nickel and naught caught up In tracks of trucks—shadows Brittle butterflies and the liquid Depths of dry grass—benzene And naphthenic acid sands Without restraints or bounds Blowing out and over this Huge sand ensnared world the  Chemical truth extracts its    70 2The Goose, Vol. 13, No. 2 [2015], Art. 37https://scholars.wlu.ca/thegoose/vol13/iss2/37Word—it’s simple really—they Tore the forest off fast like A bandage over wounded earth A blister in the sun or a song Without use value or intrinsic worth  Walking—we were seeing Silvered shunts of sand lakes Like salt flats wondering what  Winkles out in yonder mercury  Sheen? No ponds pretend to    80 Lighten belief—air canon and Scarecrow miners surround These tailings are desolation’s Dream of crumbling decor Whoever it was saw boreal Swept it clean in cold accounts Before land wastes were Fenced former forests of sand Thick dark thoughts leaching Heavy metal music machines   90 Or death metal bands screaming Unfathomable ruination inside A sealed steel cube in space   Dear imagination—lighten up! Your part is human protest But there are no visionary scenes Of lofty beauties uplifting to see Even if Burtynsky might Shoot them chromatic as Abstract patterns of chemical dirt   100 No matter!—When in service Of monetary gain and increasing Industries of land liquidation This world is anvil entertainment Bashed first peoples flat land home Still springing up thrust midst the 3Collis: Reading Wordsworth in the Tar SandsPublished by / Publié par Scholars Commons @ Laurier, 2015Fossilized dead on whose ancestral Heat we strange grammar feed  As strange accumulations folk Pummel pores and veins of     110 Saturated soils coiled up in the Barrage we make making roads And the slow bombardment Of never ending development  Perhaps I digress—the occasion Is a public walk—but the aesthetics Of the place is pure isolation pure Social and biological negation— Open maw is no landscape There is no viewpoint despite  120 The signs and picnic tables of   Doom’s treeless playgrounds No play of light at sunset on Tumescent swaths of an earth Heaving its golden breast towards  A slate sky where gawkers careen  In tin cans winged while in utter Foundries of digital light Pounding out templates of data We break to browse disaster porn   130 Look death in its vertiginous eye One house sized truck after another Blanket ourselves in perspectival Air of vanished relations—no This is just the vast insides Of machine whose impetus Money tells—no point from which To see it whole or unveil its grasp On brow of yonder hill—just a Moving power that moves itself   140 And us tempest tossed within it Sloughing boreal off its bitumen back The calculus which compels 4The Goose, Vol. 13, No. 2 [2015], Art. 37https://scholars.wlu.ca/thegoose/vol13/iss2/37Its animate limbs for alien power Is assembled from our loathing And slouches now towards Fort McMurray and Fort McKay to  Deliver a world of dead birds  And unquenchable thirsts  2  Walking—we were old technology   150 Biotic and slow moving Dropped into circuit Pilgrims circling on a Healing walk walking  All day beating the bounds  Of a single tailings pond  Between still other tailings ponds  Edge of the largest mine in the World—past Syncrude and Suncor  Refineries and the vast desart   160 Of the Tar Sands stretching  Beyond where the plants One after another were slow In their former life and smoke Now belches into the sky Kites portend silver and bent Towards distant seas piped  This is where we walked This is where we swam Voice again humming    170 Drum and song to keep us Moving beneath bullets of Economic praise spraying Billboards and the birdless Lakes on our left not Lakes but pools of poison Doing what beneath their beds 5Collis: Reading Wordsworth in the Tar SandsPublished by / Publié par Scholars Commons @ Laurier, 2015We can only guess leaching Towards the Athabasca Flowing wide nearby on    180 To Fort Chip and the toxins Captured in animal flesh there Last human tenant imagined Barren of all future good Water scarred skin and wooden Buffalo of Wood Buffalo Cigar shop life and mines And ponds where ancestors lie Don’t let the new houses fool you She said from the ruined cottages   190 Of Fort Chipewyan First Nation You can’t find the map of us On their financial statements  It doesn’t smell as bad As I thought it would (though it does smell bad or at least like a gas station world) It is surrounded by fencing And canons and clearly  Owns the police      200 Its money is heaped In deep black banks It has broken every treaty with life Its ceremony is poison It seems to have eaten the ducks Or at least their inner feathered lives Its clime is coming fast And is difficult to resist  So we circle in the sun Round a wound thinking healing   210 Circling erasure and watching As trucks erase erasure Lingering over layers where 6The Goose, Vol. 13, No. 2 [2015], Art. 37https://scholars.wlu.ca/thegoose/vol13/iss2/37Trees are several destructions gone Lines in flame earth—dust of the Dead and dying collected and Levelled by eager land movers The great trucks of nether worlds Dropping dead matter on top Of dead matter where a lake   220 Once lay where boreal forest And muskeg once stretched To the horizon ringing round  This is where we walked This is where we swam And I can only poultice The dry pieces of this Crack my eyes over Dry petrol glands of the Land stretching white    230 Flat bright glare along Thrust of bleak road round Which trucks never cease To turn in a carbon gyre  We are the species That walked out of Africa Walked everywhere Found our fuel in forests Then in the ground beneath Forests—a widening gyre—    240 Wrapped animal bone in Sweet dry grass offering And now stand in grass Beside the road offering Prayer on this first stop First of four directions We mark in our circuit Round the bitumen mine We could still vindicate 7Collis: Reading Wordsworth in the Tar SandsPublished by / Publié par Scholars Commons @ Laurier, 2015A species of limits and relent   250 Still unrelenting old sun We pry up burning ground Looking for more and movement Where we should be less and still  Second stop—drumming and Singing between two tailings Ponds edged by sand dunes The desart where the forest grew Remembrance that came and went Like a bird to its grave in the water   260  Third stop—past the refinery Smoke and Syncrude tanks The monster with its long metal Arms pulling all to hell Just don’t reach—arms—too Deep into our dreaming We’re not telling where We’re going next nor revealing The fact we have a where To go next secret futures across   270 The shores of utopia we are Walking to and upon nation Leading drowsy nation  Fourth stop and fourth Direction—still drumming And still singing—just this Just this—the elders praying Should earth be wrenched Throughout or fire wither all Her pleasant habitations and   280 Dry up ocean left singed And bare or the waters Of the deep gather upon us Fleet waters of the drowning 8The Goose, Vol. 13, No. 2 [2015], Art. 37https://scholars.wlu.ca/thegoose/vol13/iss2/37World—know that kindlings Like the morning still Foretell—though slow— A returning day lodged In the frail shrine of us aglow Old technology of people together   290 Holding the line against changing weather  3  Wordsworth—if I on this occasion Affirm anything—it is that I will Seriously pursue the simple task Of walking with those others of my time Who also small and failing are trying To walk against the traffic spilling In out and through our cities Out over and across the land— The trafficless wastes of which we all  300 Together variously depend upon The queer cool and resistant Fields streams lakes and forests That linger like old myths we once lived by But are in fact facts we still test and try  It’s then—tired and hot after the Long walk through the burnt land Sitting at last having just jumped With so many others into the Murky waters of Willow Lake   310 That I suddenly recollected The valet at the hotel I stayed at this past May Asking if I had any poems About mountains—recalling This here far from hotels And far from mountains Flat land of aspen and swamp 9Collis: Reading Wordsworth in the Tar SandsPublished by / Publié par Scholars Commons @ Laurier, 2015I had to admit I didn’t Though I had a story     320 Never yet written down How once young and too Serious unhappy and searching For I did not know what I set out to climb a mountain I’d passed many times driving Through a high pass to the Coast west of Port Alberni And Sprout Lake—a sharp peak Jutting through cloud tatter    330  It was evening already Or at least late afternoon I threw gear in my car And westward took my way Drove three hours intending To set off in the dark Camp and make the peak In the morning hold communion With the invisible world   It was stupid and compulsive   340 I wanted to hurt myself Or have something outside Myself hurt me or somehow Lift myself up out of myself Impossible weight of late Capitalist life in velvet chains Of individual expectation And the solitude of consumption  Arriving at the mountain and Parking on the side of the road   350 Fading light it was raining And late fall or early spring I forget but I could see 10The Goose, Vol. 13, No. 2 [2015], Art. 37https://scholars.wlu.ca/thegoose/vol13/iss2/37Through vapours shot tongues And promontories it was  Snowing up on the peak above  Fuck it I said I took My gear out got ready In the rain beside the Volvo One last check and I     360 Cannot find my keys  Instantly a light fell like A flash they are in the Ignition the car is locked  How many signs does one need How many times do you  Have to fail at failing?  I knew I was beat knew I’d return to my shitty Apartment and shitty job    370 Maybe escape another day Maybe never I turned In the rain my boots Crunching gravel stooped And picked up the biggest Rock nearby put it through The car’s side window The shower of small glass Beads all over the seat Drove home with the rain    380 Coming in beside me late Into the night the car’s Headlights fracturing the Vapour not knowing it Would be twenty years Before I’d write a poem About a mountain—sitting 11Collis: Reading Wordsworth in the Tar SandsPublished by / Publié par Scholars Commons @ Laurier, 2015Exhausted in the Tar Sands And fulfilling at least one thing That I had neglected doing    390  It was over reaching All this desperate over Reaching made me recall My own insignificant and Privileged hubris Lost amidst the vast over Reaching of this world Wide mine tallying Small drop in the human Mind that accumulating    400 Feeds its imagined difference Feeds though finite upon  Infinity only to hunger Always for more The world that beckons Like an open pantry door  4  Dear common—lowest Denominator—highest right Lift light of future foliage Here where bright burnt    410 Sands hinge chemical ponds Over loosest leaves of boreal— Burnt brooks and forests for Fatter fuel in bitumen beds Beneath everything we see— Remove everything we see To reveal it—paucity of Ideas for making homes Making lives led as ghosts Already haunting doomed    420 Earth we split and devour 12The Goose, Vol. 13, No. 2 [2015], Art. 37https://scholars.wlu.ca/thegoose/vol13/iss2/37 It’s elders brings us back Living idea elders drumming Singing and walking indigenous To all the overburden which Is no burden but carries Itself echolocaic through Leaves of this living and Wakes while walking still Breathing in dreamt shade    430  I could almost gather  Intuitive hopes for spring Heap method of gleaning Against Google Chrome of Most expensive trucks Or cheap flights to Vegas Or the women who—bare Commodities—travel here Or the single yellow bus Bringing migrants to clean    440 The factories of empty futures   So stop with me here and Burn out the day Burn out the night Then kindle dim mornings To further this device— What needs to die is The refusal to die—it’s Death that feeds life  If the old garden was     450 An aristocratic preserve Of clockwork geometry And the Romantic garden A radical turn in open Nature as pretend pasture 13Collis: Reading Wordsworth in the Tar SandsPublished by / Publié par Scholars Commons @ Laurier, 2015In an enamoured mind Now we return to Constructed enclosures Open pit and tailings pond Access road and wire fencing   460 A factory earth of engineered Extractions to lay commodity Paths in purchase and ensure New aristocrats their  Helicopter lives—what we Need now is a wild swerve Away from arsenic mercury And polycyclic hydrocarbons Downstream in ducks and Muskrats and moose meat    470 And the people of Fort Chip Who feed on feeding the land— A wild swerve out of entropy To new free energies spooling In anti-entropic drafts of What we can’t predict And will not yet foretell  But will imagine not as Trading futures or deposits Speculated into asset mills    480  Stopped here near the Blasted vale or just after Lift off on gas wing south Over seeming endless forest I find I still need a little Language of the Tar Sands The knowing by walking That tells how boreal grew And gathered animal cohort And plant polity over bitumen   490 Deposit and didn’t once think Noxious profit gas even when 14The Goose, Vol. 13, No. 2 [2015], Art. 37https://scholars.wlu.ca/thegoose/vol13/iss2/37Bubbling surface bogs leached And aspen trembled—even when Drinking its life from waters Just thin surfaces veiling the Pitch coppered tight beneath  What strange adaptors we are! That things will grow again Is no consolation—the difference   500 Between this situation and The situation of the old growth On top of bitumen base is the Difference between a happen And the ecological capacity To bear this happening and A making and the ecological Capacity to bear this human Act and choice—what strange Adaptors we are—moving    510 Swifter than old accumulations To chemical our hues where we Are still that vitality that springs A weed beside the poison road Banks of the poison pond Beneath arch of poison sky All remade by our adaptions  Will we—delimit—ourselves Or—ova storm of digital increase Uncap our climate and trade   520 Mere earth to reach residual heights Of the value form and receive— A new dispensation of finitude forced From the very ground we have removed And the sky we have spilt our angers on?  Let me walk a little longer at Bodily scale—we have always been here— 15Collis: Reading Wordsworth in the Tar SandsPublished by / Publié par Scholars Commons @ Laurier, 2015Tomorrow—contemplating this Landscape and letting the flood Of memories of the future in   530 Recollecting that time to come When none of us will be disposable waste That time somewhere near Where the road turns at the guarded Edge of the refinery that this However sketchy poem did become A poem I will have written Circumambulating a common to come Curling towards stillness at all scales  Having walked one amongst many   540 Through a dangerous time and place The withering land turning towards Each animal’s unrecountable face   —June 27-July 8 2014              STEPHEN COLLIS is a poet, activist, editor and professor. His many books of poetry include The Commons (Talon Books 2008; second edition 2014), On the Material (Talon Books 2010—awarded the BC Book Prize for Poetry), To the Barricades (Talon Books 2013), and (with Jordan Scott) DECOMP (Coach House 2013). He has also written two books of literary criticism, a book of essays on the Occupy Movement, Dispatches from the Occupation (Talon Books 2012), and a novel, The Red Album (BookThug 2013). In 2014, while involved in anti-pipeline activism, he was sued for $5.6 million by US energy giant Kinder Morgan, whose lawyers read his writing in court as “evidence.” His forthcoming book is Reading Wordsworth in the Tar Sands. He lives near Vancouver and teaches at Simon Fraser University.  16The Goose, Vol. 13, No. 2 [2015], Art. 37https://scholars.wlu.ca/thegoose/vol13/iss2/37

Reading Wordsworth in the Tar Sands

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Reading Wordsworth in the Tar Sands

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