Kenilworth, DC

I grew up beside this river, fortunate
to see the trees before the water
where others see dark smokestacks,
car-strewn highways cutting off
their view.  In Kenilworth the marsh
is in our face, the river only reached
by winding trails or back the park
that used to be a dump.  I played
there once by muddy water’s banks,
rolling down the grass to seawall’s
edge, panicked on approach of two
strange teens  – the strict ‘hood-lines I knew
I’d crossed.  I’d been attacked
a time or two, or feared attack,
inside that park when dark-skinned lads
who saw my pallor judged it weakness.  Now
I take it as a kind of hundred-year-old justice,
recompense for that day when,
with riflemen instead of footballers
at play, two drunk white men
stood in their skiff upon the open river
and dropped two Negroes minding targets
at the rifle club.  My white skin
had never floated on that waterway,
I thought, when I returned to Kenilworth,
all grown up.  I met a city changed,
or changing, not all of it appealing.  Tony
knew a dirty river when he saw
one, though, and threw down
the clean-up challenge.  I saw the plans,
got jazzed about that stream whose marshes,
diked by W.B. to grow his lilies,
I played by as a kid.  Back then
I idolized the ranger, Mack, who taught about
the bullfrogs, lilies, lotus; that jewelweed
could soothe the poison itch; that orange lovevine –
chucked over a shoulder – could cause
the next person that you met to fall
for you; that curly dock, once threshed,
could be ground like wheat for flour.
It was he who, knowing my adult search
for history, dug up a pic
of my young self paddling that river
whose skim I thought my hands had never
touched.  Now I feel a certain kinship
with this watercourse so tucked
in back of parkland, marsh, and trees.
I’m no Carl Cole, of course, expounding on
long decades full of history while sailing
down the river toward the bay.  I do
get out on kayak now and then, though,
lugging the shell along that winding trail
I walked when young to put in
at a river shore that I, back then,
barely knew existed.  I paddle ‘round
the peaceful upstream parts, then, nosing
along the banks, sometimes plucking cans
from out the water.  Back in Kenilworth,
I watch the young ones growing tall
and hope they’ll take more than a frog
or turtle from those ponds, hope they won’t trade
the free outdoors for three tight walls
and bars, hope they will find their early way
through marsh and woods to that brown heart
that keeps its sluggish time
behind the trees and marsh and ponds
hard by their stoops and dirty alleys.