Artesian Conditions

Chad Rutter

Sobriety: Day 193

“I’m experiencing artesian conditions.

A breach of the confined aquifer is resulting

in uncontrolled flow,”

you say, using the language of

your profession as an environmental scientist

to express how you feel.

I like when you do this.

Like when you’d silently mouth “alluvial,”

water-deposited sediment,

in place of “I love you.”

But this uncontrolled flow is of tears

you can't stop as you tell me how

you pressed pause on our marriage

while I lost my mind

knowing when it resumed, it might not.

Your aquifer empties into a pillow,

the one you hide your face behind

whenever our seven year old enters the room.

Of course he notices.

He won’t process it now. It will

lie in the silt of a tailings pond my

mining operation leaves behind,

heavy metals and hydrocarbons leaching

into his porous body until he inherits

the work of cleaning up this superfund site.

You thought I was prairie

needing restoration. Invasive species to fight,

native plants to shepherd with deep roots and

staggered blooms. But I’ve been nitrates in your

groundwater. I’ve been the false spring of

climate change waking your pollinators

from dormancy early, condemning them

to deadly frost.                                                                                                                                 

When your sobs smooth away

and you pause for eye contact,

I recognize what’s happening.

”I’m experiencing artesian conditions.”

you say. “A breach of the confined aquifer

is resulting in uncontrolled flow,”

and you laugh at your own cleverness,

giving me cover to do the same.

For a merciful moment

we’re back twenty years, a young couple

amused by each other, before the toxic

contaminate spills, the wildfires, the hurricanes

and hundred year floods, in a relationship

a couple degrees celsius cooler

than the one we find ourselves in now.