The Nashwaak River

The Sisson mine project is a proposal to build one of the world’s largest open-pit mines for tungsten and molybdenum in the heart of the upper Nashwaak River, near the village of Stanley.

The river: it used to feel unstoppable.

What is beauty without the rush of blood, the promise it used to evoke?

“[T]he possibility of a structural failure of a TSF embankment is so unlikely that it cannot reasonably be considered a credible accident or malfunction, and is thus not considered further in this EIA Report.”*

Thistles glint, molybdenum-like. Wild strawberries dangle from delicate trusses.

The water is bright as an eye; I feel like I could look into it and it would know what I know about the Feds, the arsenic, the fluoride.

A middle-aged woman in flaw-concealing black swimsuit and white bathing cap wades up to her waist from the far bank.

Is there really such a thing as a core of self that can’t be harmed, broken, broken into?

Uncannily calm, the flickering current.

Uncannily calm the ox-eyes, the vervain, the nightshade.

I consider the possibility of structural failure.

A credible accident: the damselfly perched on a stalk of timothy grass, shaggy with seed.

Before my eyes, beauty concedes, becomes a tactic, putting off the inevitable.

At the foot of the maple a cluster of white Peiris butterflies sucks the salt from a patch of dog pee.

Come live with me and be my love . . .

The firs blink their dusty lashes in disbelief.