The River That Makes Me Laugh
Eternal Poetic Injustice For Me Comes From Misspelling 'Kayaderosseras'
Some people dream of growing up to be firefighters. Others want to be doctors or lawyers or landscape artists. I wanted to be a poet. The idea was to move to upstate New York, make enough money to get by and tramp around looking at the trees and fields and listen … to myself.
In the meantime, I was lucky enough to attend a few amazing writing programs: The Iowa Writers Workshop, Sarah Lawrence College, where I graduated, and the University of Washington, where I was accepted into the MFA program in 2008.
I never finished the Master’s, which is too bad but then again, not. Education is our friend but academia, I found, was a head-shaking labyrinth. That was especially for humanities divisions like the Fine Arts, where a cut-throat climate engulfed graduate students who ferociously jockeyed with varying degrees of panic and aggression for paltry $1,500 stipends that came with teaching freshmen survey courses in English 101.
I don’t want to belabor any of this, except that now I do live in upstate New York again, and sometimes I recall my long-lost ambition to be a poet. Most particularly, I am reminded of this every time I pass a sign that bears the name: Kayaderosseras.
“The Kayaderosseras Creek, usually shortened to Kaydeross, is the largest river that lies completely within Saratoga County, New York State.”
It’s in this name that represents the end of my ambition to be a practicing poet, which is both bittersweet and amusing, and also sort of the most ideal metaphor. See, when I was working seriously at writing poetry during my days at the University of Washington, I wrote what to me was the absolute ultimate expression of the quest to write, to surf time and meaning and words.
The poem, or prose poem, was a metaphor in and of itself. It’s called “My Cannon,’’ which is really meant to be a poem about poetry — the quest to find my place in the canon. Maybe it’s a little obvious, but the poem kind of wrote itself, and it captured much from the Saratoga Battlefield as a place where this cannon/canon is rooted.
To be honest, I was and still am rather proud of the poem, which I produced during a workshop with a very well-regarded U.S. poet named Richard Kenney. This is quite ironic in that Kenney was born in Glens Falls, N.Y., and he is quite familiar with Saratoga and all the names and places surrounding this southern Adirondack region.
At the time, and with UW being in Seattle, I don’t think I had any clue that Kenney was from Glens Falls. Which may be the reason that the ONLY remark he made about the piece was this:
“You spelled Kayaderosseras wrong.”
(I think I had it Kayderosseras, leaving out the second “a”.)
I want to assure everyone that I don’t sit around and sour grapes this dispiriting bit of criticism given to me by the semi-major poet. It’s just that here I am, back in Saratoga, not writing poetry in any serious way, just running around doing real estate deals. And that means that every single day I pass a sign or I literally cross over the Kayaderosseras Creek, otherwise known as the Kaydeross.
Oddly, but with great relief, I have come full circle. I am almost completely satisfied in life, partly I am living where I love to live and also because the poem “My Cannon” was probably a poem that I would have a hard time topping.
It is a poem about poetry that suggests a certain futility of pursuit, or at least acknowledges the great tension in trying to make literal things come to life and move and speak a new language. It’s a poem that I channeled more than wrote, which for anyone out there is exactly the kind of flow state that artists spend their entire lives trying to achieve.
And the reaction? It all boiled down not to what I was trying to say, but to a misspelled word … the name of Saratoga’s biggest river that is often deliberately shortened and misspelled! To this day, like every day, I just shake my head and laugh.
Here it is:
My Cannon
I.
When I first approached the cannon, I did so with restraint. The pug-nosed spigot stared at me in defiance, or at least with great indifference, its dark recess a hole through which I vowed to never slip. Side-by-side we stood on the battlefield. I patted the cannon, asleep in the sun like a panther radiant with deceptive docility. I’d have to wake it gently, otherwise … and this is the conundrum: My cannon. Myself. Two halves bound by the frayed rope with which I am supposed to pull. As you can see I haven’t gotten very far. As it sleeps, I have wandered under the trees to write these words. Whoever so decreed the crossing must be made with this cannon could not have seen its pair of crooked wheels buried in the ground, the right deeper than the left. It doesn’t matter. There’s creek music in the Kayaderosseras. And here I’ll sit and watch the shadow of the cannon grow longer with the day.
II.
“Naked you’ll be, quilted and ornamented, before the skin begins its retraction. Under sun, against time, molecular friction, inevitable molt … that uniform won’t shield you from the disintegrated conclusion. In the meantime, I see you have suffered -- the small hole in your jacket’s cloth, under sternum: Musket shot. Lead ball like a petrified bird egg lodged in you. Hard tumor: Watch for abrupt changes; rages, melancholy, confusion. Interesting how the flannel flowers out of the neat hole, irregular petals crusted with blood. It’s as if the wound wants to demonstrate itself to the world as a single rose, which is what you brought to this field: A singular power of conviction. You expect there’s more you must do and that, together, we will carry on. Those were the orders you believe were given to you, encrypted like brainwash, hypnosis, lunacy. You’ll never relinquish this idea, so there’s no point telling you we’ll never leave this spot where I am lodged, unaligned. Unlike you, the continued fact of me is assured but for the millennial rains, the slow leprosy of rust.”
III.
This disrupted cycle, this broken circle. I speak to you. The cannon addresses me. Our ‘conversation’ will never be concluded; a riddle with no solution confronted anew every day. With its monolithic bearing, the cannon asserts an authority it assumes is ‘moral.’ As if with its literal station, the cannon has traded mobility and journey’s wisdom for ‘expanded’ consciousness. Unmovable black iron Buddha, its very physical uselessness transformed into a mock version of radiant enlightenment. And I will be consigned, among my growing list of consignments, to allow it to go on speaking to me as it does, the cannon having pegged my mind ‘uninteresting.’ If I attempt to alter that dynamic, the engagement will be the thing the cannon seizes upon as proof of my inferiority manifesting in a need to prove something. And if I don’t, the fool I’ll be, subject to all manner of continued condescension, overt and otherwise. Some days, this is quite amusing.
IV.
“When I was young, freshly forged, I was put on a ship and sent across the ocean, which swayed and rocked and let me know myself as I am: Ballast. You don’t know this ocean. You don’t know gravity. You weren’t forged. You were hewn, nicked and imperfect and impermanent, like something chopped from that stand of trees you sit under. This affinity for wood is because you were carved by small ideals, grounded in this land. You say I am grounded, in the wrong way, like shipwreck in the tidal flats, marooned and bereft as I stand here, sinking slowly in the dirt, but it’s not so. I am unattached to the false supposition that there’s any meaning outside of the way the sun is today, so deliberately infusing the dirt with heavy, low heat. You want to press on, to save and be saved. We’re already there.”
Thanks for sharing, Laura. You really are part of the canon now, aren't you. Sending love!
I do that circles thing too. In fact, I have recently written something about it. Maybe I'll share it somewhere. Thank you, Laura!