RIVER | RIVEN
The poems in this collection were inspired by a path along a river’s edge, a clandestine trail of mud where past and present, memory and imagination overlap. Walking by the river through the seasons, the author bears witness to the quiet pull of a liminal place, its echoes of family history and the slow but unrelenting erosion of the land.
Selected Poems
River Rustle
You step into the shallows
undulating with the wind
from upstream
the river’s tongue
slick silt
on legs feet
You do not travel anywhere
anymore
except to the river
listen to echo innuendo
sounds rustling
pulsing
at the back of your throat
they utter
they recognize you.
Scurf of petals
Memory is place is space
opening your body
is time raked re-
assembled
is silence kneading
the lost words.
Memory dwells in an empty house.
Memory forgives.
You walked against the current
scent of fall
scurf of petals in the river
you could not see the bottom
you could not see
your limbs.
What does the visible miss?
Memory persists.
Ledge
Each spring
another ledge caves in
as your feet touch down their sinews
bones
a base beat over and over.
What do they know the mind cannot
of trespass, witness
as you trace your wandering on paper in your invented language
scribbles where willow limbs knit the clay silt together
desperate willows
with their meshed roots reaching
pleading do not give in do not
give in.
Your mind treads the mind of the river
its crumbling elusive ledge
its fears
its hunger.
Each spring you sink deeper
into the mud
along the path
by the river.
You smear mud over the white paper.