what to do with the hedges

it turns out all legacies are connected: Europe’s 
charge through the West and the charge of 
the phragmites alongside it; the precipitate
of industrial profits trickling in threads, 
beads of toxins saturating the river’s sediment; 
and the rising seas salinating the marshes, 
squeezing the swamps farther inland. 

           				                      phragmites: 
invader, living thing living irrepressibly amidst Hackensack, 
from the Lenape ackingsah-sack, meaning stony ground, 
though more than muck and rock, the mercury 
and wastewater made sludge, mirrors in the mulch, 
poisoned the fish and killed what would have taken
much longer to kill. the capillaries of colonization have come 
to make the silt, the still-rich swamp, the mud and lotuses 
that surge in the streams between us — the rivers 
that come to meet other rivers, rivers of time mixed
with rivers of capital, the river gathered by the thaw
of lost glaciers fusing with the rivers of glaciers faraway 
and still thawing. the benefits of what was built continue to 
collide with its costs. what do we do with that complexity?
what do we do with what we know? 

      				                          they say the phragmites 
should be eradicated for its growth. they say the phragmites 
should be praised for the ingenuity of its roots. how do we 
do both? how do we honor the habitat as it is 
while mourning the way it was: the greens of the landscape 
rich with their hues, the rivulets once bucolic 
with their strokes through these meadowlands,
these pastoral worlds that we’ve injured. do we 
remove the phragmites? remove the carbon? 
do we leave them both and remove us?