Runoff by John Barton

Runoff

by John Barton

What we release into the river.
How we alter the current.

The irrigation dam on the Old Man flooding the sacred

lands of the Peigan who have lived
here for generations on the arid Alberta plains.

The salmon-ladders.
The transmigration upward

slowing on the other side of the mountains, fewer
fish ascending waterfalls now absent.
Hydroelectric

dams everywhere in the middle
of nowhere: an invisible
sustain

able environment that sells—bill
boards defaced at the gates of Banff National Park

Don’t embitter
Don’t starve the bears

The town site above Bow Falls
exempt from Parks Canada policy so it can

accommodate more: tourists unaware of

the missing wild

currant bushes we trans
planted from roadside
ditches along any highway that climbs into the eastern

slopes of the Rockies, the civilized
currants boiled
in treated Elbow River

water, sugared and cooled

cellophane sealing in their tamed
alpine savagery
which, like lovers, we grow

to forget the moment we taste it—
this confusion

of currants and river water
tartness
and intent, words

picked from the disturbed bushes and erased
of meaining in the ‘natural’

flow of discourse, it’s good for you

embossed on the empty
jars, sterilized or thrown away, which clutter
basements hungering for some purgative Boy Scout bottle drive or else

they are

dislodged from the landfill site during runoff
in the spring, residual tang mixing
with dioxins

in the water table
in the lakes and streams.