the EPA drained

the epa drained the mill pond hoping to restore the land scape to precolonial conditions which of course is all woodlands and swamps it has some thing to do with goodecology they say but I think it has moretodo with post modern deconstructionist ideology it certainly has nothingtodo with BEAUTY for the mill pond was very beautiful “a looking glass where the great egret and the glossy ibis fish” as I said in one of mypoems or A REFLECTING POOL as Knight has painted it in water color for THE OLDEST STORE and the TALLEST TREES IN RHODE ISLAND a puddlebrook and a leaky little water fall was all that was left making mypoem and Knight’s painting look like wishfulthinking picturesque makebelieve the epa put up a cruel aluminum fish ladder and a sign prohibiting the taking of herring as if herring would swim up stream to spawn in a missing pond there’s more rhyme and reason in thispoem than in the epa BEAUTY WAS RESCUED by oneman with a trusty old pay loader and a dextrous excavator that could balance big boulders on one finger and build them into walls all around and shape a gently sloping smoothstone fish ladder at the water fall it was the first time I thought of these machines as friends of the land scape but with them oneman removed a decade of silt build up and over growth oneman sculpted out a hollow for the pond like a kid scraping in the sand box with his hand I sat there in a kind of religious stupor watching the excavation for hours at a time deifying nature you could say and when oneman dug a channel to let the brook pour in it was a Cecil B De Mille thrill from the Book of Genesis I’ll be waiting for the herring to rediscover the pond in April and the mallards to retun in May with their ducklings next fall I can look forward to the red maple mirrored in the blue water at the dam and in January I can watch the ice skaters return from the brink of extinction I AM glad to enjoy the view and I AM the only animal that can and don’t distract me with the fact that the millpond is merely a head water for a mill don’t distract me with the practical the utilitarian she may grind corn and make a bit of electricity intimate with man and his waterwheels in her most deep private parts but don’t be so prudish about seduction don’t be so hetero phobic about the meansofproduction