Holding Water

Hello, friends. And welcome to this three part project designed to support my community, my family, and myself.

Part One:

I live in Floyd County, Virginia, a place that contains some of the purest, most exquisite water I have ever tasted. Though the water here is clean and strong, it is also vulnerable. My intention is to collect stories about water from Floyd County residents. I’d like to explore their relationship to the water in their lives at the top of this high plateau. Have there been any problems with drought, construction or contamination? What is the value of water in their lives? How is their relationship to water different than folks who primarily think of water as something that comes out of a faucet and is provided as a service of a town or a city? At least 85% of the water for residents of Floyd County comes from a spring or a well, not the town. As I collect these stories, I’ll sort them into categories—some may help to establish better protection for the water in Floyd County, and some may become part of a book designed to celebrate and hold water.

Part Two:

I am really looking forward to asking my friends who are writers if they will share some work about water for me to compile into a collection of water stories, poems and essays. This will broaden the project into the larger world and explore water on many different logistic, emotional and metaphoric levels. Once I have those submissions in hand as well as gatherings from my own community, I’d like to compile that collection into an anthology called “Holding Water.” It is my intention to utilize this collection as a fundraising effort to support our new environmental advocacy group "Preserve Floyd: Citizens Preserving Floyd County" so that we can do all that we can to protect the quality, quantity and beauty of the water in Floyd.

Part Three:

As this project has evolved, I have noticed that people want poems.

As I create poems as rewards for your support, I will collect them into a chapbook.

As this project continues to flow, the current of the book may shift as well.

Here's a poem I created recently that was inspired by this project:

Deep River
For Michele

Over the gaps of Cumberland

and beneath the hollow rock midway

and along the last lengthy straight-stretch

before the interstate is left behind,

my heart is a deep river

winding towards Kentucky

and you.

Swim through the sludge of the underworld.

Hold your breath, traveler, until

you can release it into clean air.

Where is the clean air?

Where is the clear, childish water?

How do we name particulates

driven by industry, corrupting each belly

of each beast that roars within the current

of this carrier, the veins of the mountain razed

with blades until there are only

the shackled wrists of drought

holding the heart hostage until it rains?

Even the rain, friend.

Even the slip-shod delivery

of what should nourish.

My heart is a deep river

winding through West Virginia,

dammed up and stuck in Tennessee.

Show me what can heal.

Show me the long, long crawl.

I’ll show you a mountain

carved into couplets

walking down the aisle

with the energy company holding a shotgun

to her belly, this wedding a sham—

no head, no feet.

Oh darling mountain, says AEP, says Dominion.

Oh let me count the ways, says Duke, says EQT.

Oh till death do us part, says Massey, says Alpha.

We’ll commit to the middle and everything else

we can exploit, obey, obey, and carried

over the threshold of change

they rot like the carcasses they are

in this rivered vision,

thrust into the thick of it,

rivered, rivered

towards your actual arms,

my heart is a wailing river

shrieking towards Kentucky

and you.

I will reach my hands deep

into watery clay.

I will rejoice in fall gardens

living through Louisville,

the insistence of brilliance, universities filled

with resistance, here’s a statistic,

here’s another, here’s how we

stop it, stop it, stop it.

But I am still deep in the gap, friend.

A drop in the Cumberland bucket

with my mouth wide open

to the poisonous sky,

my heart the only witness I can name.

I will wait for your rosebush to bloom again,

tender tendrils of thorn

taking up too much of the sidewalk.

I’ll plow through permissions

and missions, admitting my veins,

bleak with travel, to any wave

that will bury me.

Take this.

This is my blood

from a river that still flows willingly,

a mountain that needs no name,

salve to a hungry young forest.

Over the gap of Cumberland,

I carry the Blue Ridge

to you.

Our heart the source of rivers, headwaters

to the region, spilling over, shifting

shackles, witnessing bridges

even when all we can see are factories.

Can we shift this incident

into accident, this accident to action?

Can this atrocity be empathy?

Can we make this river bloom?

We’re the heart of this river, friend.

A drop in the Cumberland

bucket, halfway

home and sobbing.

Carry me the rest of the way.

Help me climb into clean.

Here's another:

WHAT COMES DOWN

In the earliest of morning light, the leaves
seem part of what the small stream simply is,
no definition wide enough to give
a separation between root and trees,
branch and blossom. If fallow limbs still grieve
the loss of green they do not mention flow,
just watch with eyes of wood the way they go.
The tapestry of spring and fall still weave
a cloak that captures how this call— descent,
decline— with each drop whispering movement,
declaring time to be the simplest way
to give the current one more chance to stay,
is not a call to action or to doze.
The water simply knows what water knows.

I deeply appreciate your willingness to consider offering water for me to hold as I create a space to hold water.

Please check in frequently for updates to this fluid and evolving narrative.

With gratitude and deep appreciation,

Mara Eve Robbins