Pocomoketry: on The Pocomoke River, Poetry, and The Human Condition

Maybe the poet is gay
But he'll be heard anyway

Maybe the poet is drugged
But he won't stay under the rug

Maybe the voice of the spirit
In which case you'd better hear it

Maybe he's a woman
Who can touch you where you're human

"Maybe the Poet by Bruce Cockburn

The Pocomoke River is, in places, a swamp. It’s just under 75 miles long and is said to be the deepest river for its width on the East coast, reaching 30 feet in the center of the widest parts. Where we put in, however, about six miles north of the canoe rental shop, it’s narrow and dark, shaded by loblolly pine and cypress trees. Where it’s deep, the water is black as tar. (Pocomoke is said to be a native American word for black water.) Where it’s shallow at the shore, the sun reflects the tannins in the water, and it glows the color of a baboon’s fur. All along the route are tiny wooden hobbits, little Buddhist monks called cypress knees. They are at once cheerful and serene.

Navigation of the first two miles can be a minor challenge: you have to dodge those knees and poison ivy, portage over or duck under downed trees, paddle around dangling snakes, navigate between tight spots. But it's like riding a bike. It only takes a moment to remember the strokes that get you this way or that.

If you’re lucky, the river is yours for a few hours. We set out with our friends—two adults and two children—at 11:00 a.m. and didn’t see another soul until about 3:30, just before we reached the water tower outside Snow Hill. The Pocomoke is such a quiet place that it seems to swallow sound. If you talk forward, no one behind will hear you. At the same time, nearly everything that breaks the sucking silence is magnified; when you stop paddling, everything is still, except the Northern red-bellied cooter, a bright, beautiful turtle that will plop off its sunning log when you float by. Even the kids were awed and mostly quiet.

“Look! Turtles!” someone would whisper. “Oh, look,” I’d respond in my best Ben Stein, “humans in canoes. Plop.”

Wildlife seemed to have lain low this weekend. Aside from the turtles, we saw only two great blue herons, some cormorants, a snake, a bunch of turkey vultures, and more spiders and daddy long legs than we cared to meet. We saw no frogs. We were on the prowl for frogs.

The Pocomoke River is the one natural place that I would go alone. I haven’t yet, but I would. The only thing standing between me and that trip is a kayak lesson. The place is the most beautiful kind of loneliness. It practically meditates for you.

Late Saturday afternoon, when we got back from our excursion, the grups grabbed some beer and headed over to peek at the river, which is less a swamp at the Milburn Landing campground and more a speedboat avenue. We watched a few water skiers take their spills, a few kids jeering and cajoling. A group had the pavilion for a party and were torturing the rest of us with their renditions of unrecognizable country karaoke, so we left the kids at the playground and wandered back to our sites.

While my husband stoked the fire and my friend’s husband tended the stove, Kim and I took a walk around the camping loop with our plastic cup full of Wild Dog Shiraz. We talked about her fortieth birthday, which had just ended (she was the recipient of the cakes), and we talked about my midlife crisis, which is a few years late and making up for it.

As it is my mission in life to pat all the dogs, I had to stop for the Welsh terrier with the dreadlocks. We had seen the dog’s owner walking earlier, Kim noting her bralessness. She was a small woman, maybe in her mid-fifties, wearing fancy-patterned leggings and a spaghetti-strap top; she was still in that state of bralessness. When I asked the name of her dog, she said, “Little Toot,” from the children’s show, and she sang us the theme song. Her voice was excellent; her pitch was perfect. But imagine how you’d feel, wandering over to a stranger’s campsite and having that stranger burst into song. It was odd, a movie moment. Kim and I didn’t look at each other, but we were thinking of looking at each other; that’s for sure.

The woman’s husband came out of the camper talking about the children’s show. He told us that when he tells people the dog’s name is Toot, most of them think he’s talking about cocaine. In our house, toot is a euphemism for fart.

By the time we left—about five minutes later—we knew their names (and they knew ours), where they were from, why they’d moved here, what they were doing, where they were going, what instruments they played, what kind of wine they liked. They invited us back for bluegrass—which Kim insists they’d been smoking—and offered us a wine refill to help us find our way home.

We talked about them from the moment they were out of earshot. Kim thought they were hippies and all on drugs (perhaps the old dude eating cereal at the picnic table at 7:00 p.m.), but I disagreed. I think they exemplified the human condition. I think they were just lonely.

We are all so lonely!

When I returned from my trip, I found a long message from a friend who lives on the other side of the country. At the end of it, she said, “For some reason, I wanted to tell you.”

I wonder if it’s because I am a poet.

When I was in my early twenties, I remember a poem by Mark Strand that captured, so precisely, the human condition. It was a two-part poem, one part from the writer, the other from the reader. The reader wrote something like this: “Dear Poet, thank you for the poem. I liked the part about the bird and the part about the tree. Lately we are plagued by uncertainty over our son. We live in an unfinished house. Every time I reach down, there is a nail sticking up. As a poet, you would understand.”*

I would. I do. We are so lonely that we will tell our stories to anyone who will listen. Look at us, with these blogs!

I think poets have an important job; it’s more important than ever. We take all the fear and hatred and soul crushing loneliness, and we absorb it, as if we had the sensitive skin of swamp frogs. Just like the canaries tell coal miners how much longer they have before the gas overtakes them, just like frogs tell us when our environments are becoming poisoned beyond repair, the poet tells us when we have done something disastrous to our souls.

Poets try to get you out in time.

My friend was sitting in her office at the college where she teaches. Her phone rang. She thought it would be a student or a faculty member, perhaps her husband. Instead, it was someone she describes as possessing a “halting southern voice.” He told her he was having trouble with a friend. She was still thinking this was someone related to her work, but the more he spoke, the more she realized this wasn’t someone she knew.

He finally let on that he is in the Army and has had a homosexual relationship, and now he is confused. He has nowhere to turn because of the Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell policy. So he chose her number. At random.

He wanted to know if he was a freak, if there was something wrong with him. He didn’t know how to have a relationship with a man. He didn’t know what to do.

My friend didn’t tell him, but she stayed on the phone and let him talk. Of course, lots of things went through her head, like whether he was a freak of a different kind, whether she was an experiment, but nothing about what he said was graphic or disturbing or creepy. It was simply sad.

“Can you imagine being so desperate to call a total stranger for advice on your morality?” she asked me.

The man, she said, called back the next day to thank her. “For some reason,” she said, “I wanted to tell you.”

“As a poet,” Mark Strand said, “You would understand.”



“Pay attention to the poet / You need him and you know it.” ~Bruce Cockburn