Dark Water - anti-pastoral in the key of dystopiaOnce a dangerous toxic landscape, Lynnview Ridge site to reopen as public park this fall, Calgary Herald, April 30, 2018.Standing on the hill where once I roamedabove the river and the beaver dam we fished.In Lynnwood overlooking the Ogden flats:tidy rows of houses below.Plumes of tall elms line the streets.Behind me the school where I read Silent Spring.*The year I turned thirteen.And learned we’d been suckered.Foreshadowing what came:a time when no birds sang.Behind me now a steel fencelike those around construction sites,and the sign: Keep Gate Locked at All Times.The house where my sister lived, bulldozed.Fifty years since I took the long road outand I’m back.The wide albino prairie gone,the sloughs, cat tails too.C.P.R’s Ogden Shops, Anthes Pipe,and the C.I.L . Closed.Gone with all the good jobs.And the tank farms above the Esso refinery,four blocks from my school,flat topped caplets and Aspirin whitewith their spiral ladders, pills for the sickness.Once we loved you, Gasoline.We couldn’t get enough of you.Your fracking towers’ diamond lights,all night flare offs hissing your names:Esso, Husky, White Rose, and Turbo.All your aliases, your alibis, we swooned.Our lips on the tailpipes of dawn.We inhaled gallons of you,sang your sweet ditties.Never imagined you’d leave us, Valvoline.The accelerator’s kickunleashed a tiger in every tank.Cars never too big, their narcotic fumes,buxom chrome bumpers and soaring rocket ship fins.Your appetite unsated like our lust.You plied us with cheap cigarettes, towels,dinnerware, at your roadside attractions- whatever it took, to woo us.That was the plan all along.How could we have known:the white tanks on the hillhad no bottoms to seal them..Grassy berms couldn’t contain you.Bleeding carbon black waterfrom the deep Devonian Sea.Ten kilometres straight down.We trusted you even when the pipes ripped.Seepage under the prairie’s glacial grout.And a slippery sludge oozed across the hard pan.We didn’t believe the trout we caughtwhen their belly tumours whisperedwe’re ruined, in their dying gasps,when they reeked of it, when it drippedfrom the sandstone crags above the Bow River.Liars, we scoffed. Who believes fishes?All the silent springs. After all,we loved you too, Vaseline,you salved our wounds , smoothed our hair.I stand now, where once I stood,On the poison ground, a spruce’sblue feather pointing skyward.Over there, elms weeping beside razed foundations,- whole streets and the houses where we lived.Where are they now, the gardeners,the Franklin gulls that hovered?Thirty-one million in lawsuits to reclaim the prairie.Named without irony. Refinery Park.Ogden is a metaphor.For all the small towns, the little people.What’s left when it’s gone.Once we loved you, Gasoline.On hot summer nights, those who still live here sayyou can smell that damned ghost refinery.And dark water rising.
Bruce Hunter was born in Calgary, Alberta, and grew up in Ogden in the shadow of the oil refinery and nearby railway shops. His poems, stories and essays have appeared in over 80 publications in Canada, China, India, Italy, the U.K and the US.
His newest book of poetry Galestro was published in spring 2023 by iQdB edizioni in Italy to wide critical acclaim. He wrote "Dark Water" during his time as Calgary Public Library’s Author in Residence in 2017 after a trip to his old neighbourhood withp renowned literary historian Shaun Hunter (no relation). Thanks to the editors of FreeFall magazine where this poem was originally published. It won the Gold prize at the 2023 Alberta Magazine Publisher’s Awards. His prize-winning novel In Bear’s House will be released soon in Italy by iQdB ediziini as Nella casa dell’orso translated by Andrea Sirotti.
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