for Carol Ferguson
i
when the blue eye of the lake looks at sky
then the sky reveals its deep reaches:
no void, no zero empty of mercy
but a bluebird pleasure, color of the robe
given the Madonna, she who gazes
on all as it is, and holds this
ii
when the lake scuds cloudy dark agate
then it remembers it is a river
held back by the stone commandment of dam
above fattening shadows of gone fish
and the soft bed where strontium, cesium
weep their half lives and won’t go out
iii
when the river wears its raiment of wind
diamond light, cottonmouth wake,
willow leaned over herself
osprey dive
and the rain, and the rain
O whole body under touch
O river, wide open
Note: Other names given the river include the Shawnee pelewa thiipi, named for an earlier an earlier indigenous community in the region, and Norris Lake and Melton Hill Lake, named after dams constructed along the river. It flows past Oak Ridge, Tennessee, where components of the atomic bombs dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki were built, and where radioactive pollution has been released into the river. The Clinch was also the site of a 1.1-billion-gallon coal ash spill from the Kingston Fossil Plant, a coal-fired power plant, in 2008.
—
Lisa Coffman is author of two books of poetry: Likely, which won the Stan and Tom Wick Poetry Prize, and Less Obvious Gods, with poems featured in Verse Daily, Writer’s Almanac, and numerous anthologies. She has received fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts and the Pew Charitable Trusts. Her nonfiction articles have been published by Oxford American, BBC News, Philadelphia Inquirer and elsewhere.
