A Shrinking Lake of Memories

About this Poem:

The Great Salt Lake can be forgotten or misplaced in its long history of shaping much of the Great Basin of the United States. I become offended when many refer to this natural wonder as a “dead lake or dead sea” for she is infused and surrounded with more life than can be counted, including us. The visible and invisible, the internal and the external—they thrive, as long as the lake lives. And while our culture and society often take this inland sea for granted, her beauty, lasting health, climatic effects, and protections, we must never desert her in her desert setting. She is to be admired, protected, and celebrated! I wrote this poem from the perspective of a water manager and an environmentalist—one who has built and operated water systems and wastewater plants for over 40 years. I realize this combination is rare in my Utah home, but in all my life work, I am one of the few who often contemplates and feels the deep impacts of such on her life that lives far below my works.

She has a voice—
She is your other mother, whom most forgot
they even had—a wrinkled, nagging one—
but with a long memory that can never drain.
Her spirit has birthed billions of fowl and life stuff.
The lineage of folks she has fed is boundless, reaching
far beyond the detached suburbias christened after her
and wrapping into the civilizations of the ancients.

She deeply reflects—
She was once colossal—sculpting soft valleys, canyons
and fertile soils, to cuddle new crops and grow society.
And she rages on—like a lonely darkened mirror—
Etched into broad, shallow horizons—dissolving…
With no escape plan—her only dreams coagulate
in the crystalline tears of her lingering silent being.

She gathers her own—
Like sour mingled airs, cold and drifting overhead—
she’s become this deep sump in a vast basin of life.
Swarming with innocent yet eager wildlife who
cannot wait to wash her in their playful and grateful
watery joys—yet she endlessly aches for a paltry hail
of sympathy or appreciation from her more human life.

She drifts, alone and isolated—
While oceans all rise—she withers away in the warm
forged blankets of industry and engraven commerce.
Heavy—like the driving oceans, but shallow, confined.
She is torsioned in compression—a pioneering legacy
waning into her memory banks, silted up with
panoramic sunsets—flowering behind the reflected
denser murmurations of blue and black waterfowl.

She labors to purify—
Within the growing fetters of fenced-in homes—
every emerald soil-watered turf imprisons her rivers
in green gravy, cuffed in suffocating nutrients they
add to her boundless rolling swells, her weary creases.
Furrows which could only ameliorate with the
stodgier balms of an empathetic ear or a soul!

She possesses a real heart—
Her flowing veins are gradually constricting, coated
in the viscid plaques of pollution, drained by deep
storm sewers, trenched beneath hot streets—angry
pavements gouged out by neatly pressed men
with tight neckties. The strangulating discharge
pinches out any relevant voice or motherly vision.

She thirsts for comfort—
Flowing strands of canyon streams impart less than
the warm airs strip away from her, leaving her long
patient touch in reddening ledgers of escalating deficits.
Like old barn wood, her many lips weather away…
And who will quench her soul, in thinning grey years?

She strives to adapt—
To survive in the greying stages, she has
shapeshifted her long amoebic shorelines—
disremembered and disembodied in tight fists of time.
The wind-frothed beaches—once contemplated
by young spring lovers tangled in enchantment
now reveal the rotting mysteries of her elder sands.

She continues to feel—
She is an artifact of everyone’s younger past!
Possessing in her muddy hand’s scraps of every mine,
every single farm, factory, extraction, and domicile—
including all the careless spills of toxins she absorbs.
Textures of steel rails and causeways have divided her
in peculiar tints, but she does not succumb—yet.

She has exquisite taste—
The tithes of discarded wealth layer into deep
sediments and dissolve in her shallow warm
compounding mineral salt baths. Copper, silver, and gold
sleep with their venomous cohorts—mercury
lead, and zinc. She can even taste the acrid urine
of every creature who has pissed away its loves,
its lives, which delicately thrive downstream.

She endures—
Silently—she treks on, she pioneers, the absolute best
a mother can do. Painting the shadowed alpine slopes
steep with the vapors of white velvet, ascending from her
rosy, wind-torn belly. And yet her compassion attracts
even more settlers—making beauty her own worst enemy!

She never stops nurturing—
Now contracted from the bloated days of her extended
motherhoods—her silver hairs and white stretch marks
lie scratched across the vast plains of burning salt—
where the drawdowns of waters and wetlands lie
scorched by the dragons of heated political squabble.

She sacrifices her all—
Massive dams and pipelines lap up much of her
lifeblood. But amid the conflicts of the papered
schemes of developers—she foregoes another warm
meal to meet her promises to quench every open and
thirsty mouth—perched upon her long eastern skylines.

She spiritually longs—
Through opaque belches of smog, they have forgotten
she was also meant to be part of an endless family—
to live on in the cycles of an eternal sanctuary!
Every vanishing marsh robs her of children
to suckle, to nurture, or merely to read to in her
peaceable blushes and her broadly painted vistas.

She unabashedly weeps—
As a surrogate of the voiceless, she cries in palls
of liquified life—which evaporates under the deliberate
dry winds of stark indifference.  If she shrinks any more—
her only legacy will be the silent waste of desolations—
bags of dry dust and stink—sweeping up a valley floor
which once was swathed in camas, sage, and all the
hopes in her life of a caring future, framed in the
picturesque glow of sweet and selfless compassion.

And she remembers forever—
If she dies, the visible and invisible, her lovely children
will die too—they thrive as long as she does. Mother
lake or merciless desert? Her mother is the ocean
and she will lovingly take her home, but her
gain will be our defeat. Her losses already haunt
our thirsts, as the last line of thoughtless children
her rebellious children—who even in desiccated
songs like these—she reaches out and she loves.

We should never forget—
Our memories must never fade into the spreads
of forgetful desert dust. Our common finale can be
decided on the rolling shores of a distant setting sun—
flaming on the embers of warm resolve to protect her
from impending blinds of a cold and heartless night.
Or we can keep in our course of blind indifference.

But when I look upon her—
I still see an endless home. Perched on vast grey wings
of the unconditional love of all life—a perfect grace of
water, earth, and sky—dancing in the azure flows of a
saintly peace, and a vision of her expanding generosity.
Stimulating us to never shrink from our responsibility—
to cherish and protect our other mother of life—forever.