Ali Alizadeh
Merri Creek
for Robert Adamson
Rivers are all the same. Dirty water
if you’re lucky, smelly mud and silt
increasingly the case. And dreary
water sports, flotillas of filthy plastic
bottles and bags; I’d like to emphasise
the stench. Caesar’s Rubicon
on the other hand, soaks my head
in a tale of courage, confrontation
I read when I was seven. On Twain’s
Mississippi, in my room, I floated
away from the indisputably evil
place I was born in. And the Seine
luminous, a Third World dream
for life in a Western city. I swam
in the weird, inexplicable words
of your Hawkesbury, a migrant
with little English, holding my breath
under the phonetics of birds’ names
and scales of fishing metaphors. Then
I was drawn to Melbourne, and lonely
in the struggle with life and poetry
I kept my head above the dark surface,
the swamp of desire and alcoholism,
by drifting alone on the rundown trail
along Merri Creek. I’d scowl at geese
and unwittingly infuriate the drakes
on macabre winter days, menacing
summer evenings. Banks, hardly scenic
after routine floods, beaten willows
cobwebbed with human waste: cable
wires, shoes, tyres, etc. I repeat
the river reeked, a feral fusion
of organic and manmade decay. But
what can I say; leafy corridors,
sunlight accentuating algae
on stream’s translucent face,
even rusted didactic plaques; picture
of these usually soothes, protects me
when I’m hurt or restless, marooned
in China, Turkey, Dubai, Sydney; it’s
just a river, like I said, and just
about the only place I’d call home.
