Said the River When I Asked for Their Song
“and whatever the man called each living creature, that was its name” — Genesis 2:19
Very well, call me river.
Call me Merrimack track me back to Pemigewasset to Winnipesauk.
Call me mother father and apron strung
deep lunged
lover. Call me confluence,
call me flood and slug name me strong place and
bathe me into fable.
Dance me out as your tradition your tributary.
Construct me as your creation myth.
Sing my hair of braided salmon,
map my curves, my cock, my cunt, my noting, my not.
Mark this salinity,
paint my Pawtucket Falls and survey
my alluvial belts of stone.
Drag my gut for your stolen cars, your suicides, your sediment.
Define me by your dams and your damned. Denotate my silt detonate
my banks so I bleed and braid you with canals.
Swim out, son of man, with brush of lips.
You’ll never find me in your box of words, your book of failed verbs,
for I too wide, I too winding, I too glass of sky,
and you will drown for this kiss
on your swallowed tongue and idiom.
* * * * *
Sapphic
Merrimack snaking through sighs of craggy
floe and log, whispering that spring may shake blue
hair from out the hillocks’ slow skull of winter.
Yet of the clawing
freeze and water streaming by banks and grasping
trash and rusted truck parts that sink though mud and
poison blood and bone, the black river flows like
nothing will matter,
happen, change, or even has ever been or
ever been not. Time may exist or it’s some
cracked Edenic covenant, human built, and
just a machine that’s
building machines, making all estuaries —
where our salted flesh seeks salinity, some
delta of eternity — lost,
trackless as divinity.