The Book of Drought

Over the years, Rob Carney's poems have appeared in Dark Mountain in print and online. Today we share an extract from his recently published collection The Book of Drought, winner of the XJ Poetry Prize, set in a near-future landscape wrecked by water shortages. Instead of water: dead lakebeds. Instead of wild animals: bones. No one has adjusted yet, but some gather in an empty river to grieve, remember, and to tell their stories.

Recently, after writing essays, I thought maybe there’s a better way to reach people and get them to listen – like parables, those old teaching stories; and satires, although I worry that the ones being satirised might be too dumb to get it anyway. Humour can reach people, true, but Oscar Wilde probably noticed that any Lady Bracknell types in the audience either missed the point (dramatic irony) or just stormed out.

So with The Book of Drought, I’m trying a new way, which is an old way, really: literary realism, but with two changes.

First, I’ve taken away an element: water.

And second, I’ve skipped ahead to the ending. I’ve jump-cut to our near future, when people have to live in a landscape wrecked by drought. What will that really be like? Because maybe if people have to see and hear and feel that, they’ll be moved enough to act before this is it.

So I’ve made the lack of rain, lack of rivers, lack of lakes the setting where the characters gather like pilgrims. They gather to grieve and remember, adjust and hope. And they do this by sharing their stories.

When Water Was Still An Element,

no one needed it in writing.
Lakes were lakes, and you could see them

or wait until spring
after the ice-break.

Rivers would trace the earth’s outlines
brown or blue,

like math,
like a set of logical givens.

And it was a given, and it still is math;
it’s the people who are minus signs:

Drain it all faster than it rains or snows,
and there you go.

≈

They held a vote.
I’m the one they elected

to be the Listener and Reservoir and Scribe—
the one who records this.

Say, the green of a hummingbird’s feathers
as it hovers,

then the shapeshift purple
when it moves.

Say, the sound of a lake
against a boat dock: like tucking in a child,

or like slosh
whenever wakes come rolling.

“Write it all,” they tell me,
so I fill up the margins.

I can’t be yet another thing
that lets them down.

≈

He tells me: “The wind
is what gets us,

especially at night
with so many trees dead now.

We think we hear the baby crying,
but the baby’s fine.

There’s just no leaves anymore,
no leaves for that sway-sound and rustle.

When the wind cuts through,
it makes a pitch the same as crying.”

≈

A kid wrote this letter to the future:

Dear Future,

If I could, I would hand you this letter myself, but I don’t know where you’ll be when I get there. My mom says it wasn’t always like this, with everything drought. That means no more water.

We still have bathtubs and sinks, but nothing comes out. The faucets are empty. And we still have glasses in the cupboard but mostly use canteens, and you only take sips is all.

If you already know that, I hope not, not unless it’s in a book. I like to read books, even sad ones, but maybe you’re ok, and you don’t have asthma, and don’t have to hide on the dustcloud days.

And maybe there’s a swimming pool that’s full so you can jump in.

≈

One friend remembers her sister.
She says, “At least she died

before the worst of it.
Seeing this river empty

would’ve made her cry.
She used to come rafting here.”

One friend used to be a ski instructor.
And one kid brings me a map.

He’s fourteen,
above-average angry:

“You mean, this was real?
Like all of this blue was really water?”

One friend always wears
steel-toed boots,

and his daughter’s always wearing
that butterfly costume.

“I have to,” she says, “so they can find me.
And I’ll bring one to you.”

≈

This river looked like a diamondback—
its sandbars raised, and black boulders—

snaking its way through the heat
baked daily into cliffs.

And this one followed the elk’s migration.
And this one used to have a name.

And this one, wider, made you shield your eyes—
that bright,

its shimmer
electric on the surface.

And this dry river was the site of a wedding
between an aspen forest and the moon.

The sky gave the Future as a gift,
but it didn’t say what kind.

Poems republished by kind permission of Texas Review Press.

The Book of Drought is available to buy here.

Dark Mountain: Issue 25

Our Spring 2024 issue is an anthology of non-fiction, fiction, poetry, interviews and artwork inspired by the struggle for land rights, and by the living land itself.