You felt it
as your heels sank slowly
into gummy grains rimming
a finely sorted shoreline;
from sandy lips
fluted like crinoline skirts
you felt siren song
tucked away among gritty runes.
Good time to get up and walk away.
This river loves a ruse.
Temperamental bards
require a lazy audience.
So you slow down
long enough
to watch alluvium drop –
down
three inches to rusty sand
six inches to fine mud
two inches to silt
outlining
nine coon tracks.
You sit satisfied,
thinking
blessed are the patient,
and the river leads you on.
You feel a rhythm,
it hooks your braided logic.
Good time to get up and walk away,
good time
to seek a Heisenburg translation
for river speak – he’d say
it’s never here – never now
always here – always now.
You could take an hour
to mouth
one syllable,
you could love mud
in your teeth;
but a river hoards its lore for locals -
heron and chub.
River tongues sing beyond us,
so you must slide deeper
than your days,
descend darkly
into the hottest August hours.
So what
if silt becomes a second skin
and you glisten with mica sand;
so what
if ruddy clay gilts your body,
and the sun bleaches your bones?
You must slide deeper than the Devonian,
fall deftly into waterless respirations,
bear the burden of a billion tamarisk seedlings
nursing the aquifer dry.
You must witness
coyote willow and cottonwood
negotiate treaties with russian olive,
witness them
council with equisetum
on thriving three hundred million years.
Stuck in the mud,
you might lose your bearings
long enough to notice
how shadows hold the foreground.
Stuck in the mud,
with your teeth in its mouth,
you might take three breaths with this place:
one for a pink canyon
one for a thirsty sky
one for a rakish river.
Stuck in the mud,
porous as fossiled bones,
you might snag some tattered tune
strung together like prayer flags.
Be the flags!
Be the rhythm
pushing water and wind,
folding sediments into a shoreline
where you sunk your heels
just moments ago.
I tell you
it’s a good time
to get up
and walk away.
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