a lake looks at humans

Across the planet, over a hundred irreplaceable inland seas are in peril.

In the fall of 2021, I listened as biologist Dr. Bonnie Baxter explained the impending threat of losing Great Salt Lake due to human diversion. In the radio interview, she describes the perpetual toxic dust storm that would arise in the lake’s absence. She speaks calmly, like a veteran doctor who knows how much hinges on her steadiness when delivering a fatal diagnosis. During the conversation, the ordinarily talkative host falls silent more than once. 

“Would Dust Bowl be overstating it?” he asks quietly.

“That would be understating it,” she replies. 

I heard her clarion call and understood that existence here in Salt Lake Valley sits on a precipice. As it did for many others, Dr. Baxter’s interview shook me from my stupor and changed the course of my life. I felt the tidal shift inside and turned my face toward the lake. With the eyes of an impending loss, I saw my lifelong neighbor for the first time, finally recognizing a fierce protector, an ancestor, a friend, a creator and sustainer of life, a maker of beauty, the shaper of this entire landscape. With eyes unclouded by apathy, I saw someone I could not survive without. 

When the life of someone you love is at stake, you stay with them. I began to keep vigil. 

As a vigil keeper of a beloved water body, I have a staggering amount of company. Across the planet, over a hundred irreplaceable inland seas are in peril. Many are already gone. The human and beyond-human communities that used to live along the shores of Owens Lake and the Aral Sea are now in exile. Recently thriving fishing villages now gather dust. The cries from the people of Tabriz near the last remnant of Lake Urmia are terrible: 

“Open the dams! We have less than four months.”

I offer this poetry collection as a practical guide in a world where water bodies are assaulted and imperiled everywhere. 

Some poems are calls to assemble a visible lake-facing community; others are mantras for a silent core of vigil keepers who meditate daily on behalf of imperiled waters. This collection includes prayers made in marble halls, spells cast on receding shores, and a proclamation of Great Salt Lake’s personhood and sovereign rights. I hope these poems will serve as a prayer book for replenishment and a playbook for restoration. 

Across hemispheres, rivers have been set free by ordinary, broken-hearted people willing to devote themselves to the water and the life that water sustains. Ordinary people who show up again and again bring down the dams. 

Dear Reader, if you are broken-hearted enough to be devoted, water calls on you to rise. Nothing more than your willingness is required. 

I send these words with love toward your shorelines. May they serve us as we work to restore the rivers and replenish the seas. We are needed, and now is the time.

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I’ll post a poem from the Beloved Water Body manuscript each week. This one emerged recently after reading a poem by Carlos Drummond De Andrade called An Ox Looks at Man, which is posted on my friend Lynne’s refrigerator. I’ve read it to very few people. I’d love to hear from you about it. What comes up for you? What did you notice? Please tell me in the comments.

a lake looks at humans 
 after Carlos Drummond De Andrade

more unquenchable even than phragmites
they crowd each other out. young 
among the species, brash and arrogant. 
like ants in a frenzy, they hurry
the tarry roads they’ve made.
apart from rushing, they’re not good at much, 
but they certainly can pave.

perpetually discontent, they build and they wreck.
erratic children thrashing in a dream
and yet—even as they siphon off my life 
spew poison, and tighten my tourniquet,
i call to them and beckon them to sing.

some of them come. 
when they respond in song 
i can’t help but feel a swell for them. 

they are clumsy and delicate.
some even claim they are trying to save me. 
at first their earnestness made me laugh 
now it stirs the depths of my salinity– 
the way they mean it! 

you could start, i try to tell them, by lessening your harm. 

if they would listen, 
i could teach them to be elegant.