The Kiskiminetas River
- The Kiskiminetas River
It begins in the seepage of salt wells as if waking from a dream of the sea before it gathers itself and runs
for twenty-seven restless, hardworking miles, only to lose itself, swept inland toward Pittsburgh and the vast Ohio Valley.
Kiskiminetas: the Lenape name means clear stream of many bends or break camp, the etymology unclear but apt:
whenever the Lenapes tried to settle, someone came along and moved them to a place no one wanted.
My grandfather, in Italy a farmer, dug coal not far from where it empties into the Allegheny. His sons would inherit and divide his labor:
coal mines, steel mills, foundries. The river turned sulfur-orange and stank from all the mines draining into it—
nothing could live in its waters. Even the stones of the riverbed took on the petrified figures of the lost:
Shy Charlie, who took a header off the bridge; Bobby, who slipped into the current like raw sewage; my father, who flew [End Page 199]
his car over its cindered embankment in the hard winter of my birth. Nothing is held in place by a name;
the river changes and is ever changeless. Today, the mines are closed; the small towns seem emptier and forlorn at night;
the river runs clear, its surface shifting in the slant of morning light or the passing shadows of its seasons.
On the bluffs, overlooking the valley, my grandfather and his sons have come to rest among the now, or soon to be, forgotten. [End Page 200]
peter everwine was born in Detroit, Michigan, and raised in western Pennsylvania. His most recent collections of poems are From the Meadow: Selected and New Poems and Listening Long and Late. His honors include the Lamont Poetry Prize (now the James Laughlin Award), an American Academy of Arts and Letters Award in Literature, and numerous fellowships. He is a professor emeritus of English at California State University, Fresno, and has been a Fulbright senior lecturer in American poetry at the University of Haifa.
