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In The Tar Sands - Going Down

by Mari-Lou Rowley

from Regreen: New Canadian Ecological Poetry

Listen to Audio

from CBC Poetry FaceOff, Feb 08 with Lee Kozak on guitar

Hey luscious baby
by-product of the infernal machine
stem cell automaton

make me perfect, past
tense and release, past
learning from mistakes
past-present, future-perfect
oh perfector of defects
in flesh, water, air,
perpetrator of polite wars,
pipelines across continents and so many new
cars, jobs, cans of Dream Whip.

Watch them foam at the lips
dream rivers of oil,
brazil-waxed forests
engorged orifices
oh white white teeth.
Pearly Whites, the adman grins,
“for a smile you can sink your teeth into.”

Hey what’s that smell, sound, taste?
Lick of salt-glazed
prick, palm, hollow of knee
radiation-seared flesh
brazen and naked under the noon sun
see oh two
oh see
only two of us
fondling under leaves
mottled and falling
under a sky mortally dazed
under clouds weeping acid
leaching moisture
out of the trope trop troposphere.

Look up! look way up,
nothing but haze and holes.
Look down!
bitumen bite in the
neck arms thighs of Earth
a boreal blistering,
boiling soil and smoke-slathered sky.

And all those errant cells,
erotic electric discharges
mutated genes, neurons
gone wrong
under the strobe
under the probe
Burn it! Ignite it!
Hey baby what’s your
action potential?

Identify and seize
Invest and develop
Reward and satisfy
Strip and reclaim.

Knees to ground
head to groin
grovel and growl
scourge, gouge
rip it rip it
rip it all out.

From space
pock marks in Earth
the size of countries.

While boys in boardrooms
heavy hitters fossil fuelling
in the heat of the night
in the heat of the right
in the heat of the might
of how many million barrels a day?

Ah, the smell of crude oil
in the morning.

Hey baby, let’s turn off this noise
turn on the radio
exceed disturbance
rip off our overburden
pull and pound
get emotional, physical
ontological
illogical
wear our hearts on our sleeves
until breath leaves
in gasps.

Let’s wade in the tailing ponds
slather our bodies with sludge and sand,
light a cigarette, keep the motor running
roll over like fish in the Athabaska
bloated bellies toward a dazed sky.

Drink from the lakes of our bodies
until shorelines recede,
tumours become visible.

Until rivers dwindle to tears
until wells gush blood
until bankers weep sweat
until hell freezes over
until raw and singed
as the forestless birds
as the fishless rivers
as the speechless politicians
as the songless, barren face of the earth
we go down
we go down.