Upstream

                                          Chapter Twenty-three

                                                     UPSTREAM

    

                                                      Watercolor by Steve Esteban

When I discovered the poetry of Jeff Hardin several years ago, I read his “Always Upstream or Downstream” and was moved to tears.  Jeff is a Professor of English at Columbia State Community College in Columbia, Tennessee, and has published many poems and several books.  This particular poem recalls a stream in Tennessee where, as a boy, he floated a canoe with his best friend, not his “brother by blood”, but one “whose memory on earth” was worth fighting for.  “Men grow old to learn a young boy’s trust of everything that is”, the poet says.  Read slowly, to the very last line, and tell me if this is not an eloquent paean, combining love and nature, life and longing.

 Always Upstream or Downstream

               By Jeff Hardin

We'd push out in an old canoe to float Horse creek,
fishing poles in hand, a Maxwell House can of red worms
dug up from a place we kept a secret past the barn.
Maybe we had all day—who knows—and maybe a day
meant nothing to us, for all of eternity belonged
to the wind on our faces and the slip-slap sound
of the paddle seeking cool and dark-green, still pools
thick with bream and bass and slick-bellied catfish.
Someone had told us catfish were mythic creatures
that could rise up to walk on water and up the slick banks
to perch themselves in cottonwoods; and maybe they could,
but we never saw them, always upstream or downstream
and never quite lonely enough in our hearts. Albert,
who was not my brother by blood but whose memory
on earth I'll fight you for, would take his rod and reel,
bait the hook with such a gentleness, a patience—
he made a music of it, a visionary music
in praise of fish hid out beneath decaying logs
or sunning themselves in shallows. Such iridescence,
olive and yellow—such craft of dorsal fin and gills.
And the two of us stalled in the middle of nowhere,
the only two people in the history of the world
who would ever see these fish! His cast was flawless,
smooth, almost silent, a balletic motion despite the limbs
we had to navigate. The world believed its wars
and greed, believed its clocks and fame and arguments
of history, while silence seemed to push at us
from every side, until the boat bumped the creek bed.
Even now the bliss of that surprise, the memory of it,
the climbing out to drag and tug, to hear the grit
of an existence that sometimes must be hauled
from one dry place to deeper water. Men grow old
to learn a young boy's trust of everything that is;
but Albert won’t grow old, just young and younger,
forever tying flies, biting off the excess string,
trailing his hand in the coolest water of earth;
and I’ll grow old and older, the wide world filling up
with loss of all we ever saw and marveled at
there on that creek from which long summers go on drinking.

Copyright (c) 2010 by Jeff Hardin. All rights reserved.

My old canoe floated many miles on Kinniconick and I sensed the same silence and then the surprise, “the climbing out to drag and tug, to hear the grit of an existence that sometimes must be hauled from one dry place to deeper water”.  Moving upstream was always a battle when the creek was high, but “even now the bliss of that surprise, the memory of it”, makes me want to cry.  Upstream, something like the life we live, the goal we reach after battling many currents.

And finally, Jeff Hardin speaks to old men like me: 

“I’ll grow old and older, the wide world filling up

with loss of all we ever saw and marveled at

there on that creek from which long summers go on drinking.”