Runoff

Forty years back, Edmonton spring,
we'd ride the bus north to Spartan's Club.
Punk bands screamed out their rage,
while we learned to get drunk with our parents' rum
cut with tap water out of a mason jar.
The spring water bit sharp, sulphur-edged,
with a chlorine-burn. We'd pinch our noses 
just to swallow these drinks mixed with the
spring thaw's wild soup made from decomposing
field stubble, leached minerals, manure, road salt and
oil, and all of last season's dying.
The gag sometimes rose strong. No matter.
We'd swallow as the music roared louder.
That smell was the first lesson: water,
intoxicating, carries everything.
I hadn't yet learned to think of the water
runoff as agentic, seeking slope,
didn't know its fluid syntax etching
ditches edge, washing silt into the
culvert's dark throat; the land annually
shedding its skin, pouring itself downhill,
the North Saskatchewan river
also screaming the season's angry slough.

-Monique