Deep in a tangle of greenbrier
alongside the winding mud-stained Tar river,
an orange line points straight to riverbed.
I draw it in, one hand over the other
until a shadow runs just below surface,
then breaches, a latticework cylinder,
a cage meant to trap hidden things, make them known.
We have no senses, you and I, not for the murk.
Our eyes can’t pierce it, lungs can’t breathe it in,
that dark domain is a mystery to us.
We don’t even know what it means for this place
to be well, so how can we detect its faltering, its collapse?
hence the traps. I break open the clasps,
dump its one occupant into clear water to see
this singular deep denizen, a Neuse River waterdog,
leopard spotted, foot long, decades old already,
its scarlet branching gills pulsing around its chestnut brown face.
Nobody I’ve met here knows him, how his species
choked, and still do, in the silt the Triangle calls progress,
how the river he is named for became too dirty to bear
and forced his kind out of the main stem and out
onto the creaking delicate branches of the river tree.
They don’t know or care or know that they should care
for this endangered bit of God’s art collection that struggles
to survive in the very water we all dip our ladles in.
I quickly do what I was hired for, take measurements,
let the waterdog slip from my fingers back into darkness.
I know you, little one, I’ll banish ignorance,
make sure no one forgets you.
—
Garrett Sharpe is an environmental microbiologist, hiker, naturalist, and poet from central North Carolina. Garrett’s poems showcase the plants, animals, and landscapes he loves, as well as the threats facing them in an ever more human centric world. He is a board member of the North Carolina Poetry Society, has been published in Pinesong and The Heron Clan VI, and received the Ross L. Andrews Nature Poetry Contest Chestnut Oak Award in 2020.
