50
CIRQUE
Inflicted
Sheary Clough Suiter
Daniela Naomi Molnar
River Notes Underneath my house, two rivers begin. ~ The concrete of my house’s foundation presses down on the buried tributaries of two major watersheds: the Willamette River and Johnson Creek. I know little of their histories or ecologies. My impulse is to look them up online in order to learn more — binary electrical authoritative memory, tell me about this place that my body inhabits daily. Tell me what I ought to know. ~ I know: the Willamette River runs mostly north/south. It merges just north of Portland with the Columbia River and then heads northwest to the Pacific, reaching it at Astoria. I know that it is still a large river in Eugene, a city hundreds of miles south of here. I am contextualizing the river by its urban landmarks, imagining the nippled blue dots pinned to a digital map, denoting “a place.” ~ I know: Johnson Creek runs near Interstate 205. I associate it with “Felony Flats,” a traditionally rough, and, yes, flat, neighborhood in Portland, near my house. I once visited a dog shelter and went for a walk on a paved bike path that runs near the creek. I was walking with my ex-husband and a sweet, frenetic mutt who we did not adopt. The
creek runs near a store that sells large rocks. I plan to visit this store to buy rocks for a new garden. The store’s rocks are not sourced from Johnson Creek. ~ When I asked my students yesterday about their favorite place in the world, one said that her favorite place is inside an airplane, watching a prolonged sunrise or set. This “place” is an observational stance predicated on the constant, extremely rapid motion of the observer. Is that a place? And if so, where is it? ~ Does a point in constant motion constitute a place? ~ Sitting on my couch, a car speeds by behind my head, passing through the intersection my house’s corner lot abuts. An intersection is a kind of confluence, perhaps. A friend of mine is leaving the country for nine months. She parks her car by my house and I promise to move it for her every two weeks. The city has rules about the stagnancy of objects. Cars must move at a minimum of 14-day intervals. Rivers, which want to move both with their current, downstream, downstream, and laterally, up and over their banks, are often constrained, with neither type of movement allowed to them. High concrete walls barricade, constrain. Before these barricades were built, the Willamette’s banks changed position by hundreds of feet, depending on season, weather, and perhaps, too, on the river’s mood. A river can be angry. A river can grieve. A river can be captive, lonely, driven mad. ~ Rivers are shifty, moving according to an internal logic not accessible to the human mind. Today I say meandering to the river when I bike over it. I say wandering, I say volitional movement unbounded by linear truth. ~ Outside my window, a flock of small, gray birds moves from an electrical line to a patch of dew-strewn grass — line to grass, line to grass… a mass of small bodies moving as one diaphanous, dark, shifting veil. ~~~~ Barry Lopez’s River Notes begins, “I am exhausted.” The narrator has been standing by a body of water, watching it for a very long time: weeks or eons. I dream myself into the narrator’s vantage. I stand there, endlessly compelled to keep observing water. I am bewitched, transfixed, held in place by a force so much larger than my will or