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    System and Population
    System and Population
    System and Population
    Ebook116 pages48 minutes

    System and Population

    By Christopher Sindt

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    About this ebook

    Christopher Sindt’s System and Population returns to the primary theme of Sindt’s earlier collection, The Bodies: the impact of human desire on the natural world. System and Population focuses on the proposed damming of the American River canyon in northern California—working with source texts such as geologic studies, government documents, and the diaries of gold miners—to study the intersections of personal experience, scientific study, and the politics of rivers and dams. It is a personal eco-poetics that embraces the tradition of the lyric, experimenting with collage and the explicit inclusion of historic and scientific data. System and Population meditates on human experiences, such as parenthood and loss, and also studies the dissociative effects of environmental damage and disaster
    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherParlor Press, LLC
    Release dateNov 1, 2016
    ISBN9781602358881
    System and Population
    Author

    Christopher Sindt

    CHRISTOPHER SINDT is an Associate Professor of English at Saint Mary's College of California, where he teaches in the MFA Program in Creative Writing and serves as the Vice Provost for Graduate and Professional Studies. He is the author of The Bodies (Parlor Press, 2012) and the chapbook, The Land of Give and Take (Momotombo Press, 2002).

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      Book preview

      System and Population - Christopher Sindt

      Headwater

      briefly

      during floods

      streambed

      assembling thunder

      impacts

      of the unnecessary

      "Let it be my faith

      too. That there is

      an order"

      bright and peopled—

      weddings,

      parties, systems

      to be

      studied—

      dry dam captures

      the freshet,

      rising,

      mock-orange

      appearing as

      weaponry,

      tiny tabernacles

      System and Population

      Seal the river at its mouth

      take the water prisoner

      fill the sky with screams and cries

      bathe in fiery answers

      —Townes Van Zandt, Lungs

      1.

      Graph of the water table

      This morning’s children

      At the confluence

      Among whitewater

      "Weaving of a figure

      Unweaving, an art of

      Unsaying"

      Weave in torrent,

      An outpouring

      Bitter cup

      Figured wind

      On Christmas day

      In tumult

      2.

      The undertow of these glances, arms entangling, embracing the rose of morning.

      The world is not common here: a welcoming shiver, appliances dumped in the river and the rusting of this or that love—

      My sisters and I are fishing, and I am practicing the day-glo smear of fish-eggs.

      She says my care was a form of carelessness (there on the open bridge).

      And the winding and unwinding: water moving through subsurface material or what flows beneath the surface on its own path.

      This might be a letter to the drowned ones—Charlie, Monica, Joseph, James—a tribute or tributary, elegy or testament.

      Never posted, possibly never conceived.

      Or, an article in the Sunday Journal with the headline: underflow as tribute to injury catching on in westerns states.

      They were leaning over the tackle box, niggling over worms. Barbed hooks.

      Flyline, leaders, tippets, fisheggs and nymphs. Two days after Christmas, sheet-metal sky and shivery girls.

      I stepped on a rusty stove lying under water, lost the ability to think, blood gushing as I pulled my foot from the river.

      Past, past, past tense, river was full of garbage and rust, river was unprotected.

      We confirm the value of the Pinus sabniana: 40-90 feet, broad, heavy cones, 3 needles in a bundle, grey.

      John Muir: No other tree of my acquaintance is so substantial in body and yet in foliage so thin and pervious to light.

      Miwoks boiled twigs, bark, and needles into a strong tea. Foothill, Grey, or Digger.

      To review:

                   a) the grey pine keeps its powers inside

                   b) I discovered the hospital and the rigging of my big toe.

      Time and memory. Work in the present a type of sifting made fictional through missteps and definitions.

      An affluent flows into a larger river or lake, as do the lines of mind and grammar.

      One could also imagine gas and dust expanding away from a particular point in time and space, seeming to lighten its value,

      and the poem too a kind of expansion.

      An acquaintance that announces itself speaking its substantial body to the mountaineer.

      An acquaintance that listens. That it might be overheard making an acquaintance: haggard, broad-bodied pine.

      That the tree might not listen to the man beside the flowing affluent in the canyon above the river.

      But here in the poem the pine might disappear along with the Miwok and the interpretation.

      A river without water but retaining its words and definitions. The boy has never cut his toe and the bridge has never been built.

      We could begin our story again as headwaters continually begin: I see myself nine years old now lying on the rock as two teenage girls examine and bandage the injury,

      a ripped headscarf as a tourniquet, codes of behavior learned from television.

      Now it begins to mist slightly through the canyon, the pines shifting in medium wind.

      It was morning, two days after Christmas.

      time, time. It’s time.

      This eye is painting today in its socket. Running water, grey pine, sheet-metal sky.

      3.

      Engaged in direction,

      ashamed by

      entering, like others:

      beneath

      the ripples

      (far apart, they put us):

      beneath the afternoon:

      abyss-mal, the gap

      beneath swallows

      and dragonflies:

      winter:

      an issuing

      from the earth

      (dampening prayer):

      and so, this is

      an authority

      of the river.

      4.

      It is keenly beside us, the river, spreading

      fine mist through the evening, freshwater

      on your upper lip, breads and cheeses, blankets,

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