Poetry |

“Said the River When I Asked for Their Song” and “Sapphic”

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.

Contributor
Matt W. Miller

Matt W. Miller is author of The Wounded for the Water (Salmon Poetry), Club Icarus (University of North Texas Press), selected by Major Jackson as the winner of the 2012 Vassar Miller Poetry Prize, and Cameo Diner: Poems (Loom). The recipient of poetry fellowships from Stanford University and The Sewanee Writers’ Conference, Miller teaches at Phillips Exeter Academy where co-directs the Writers’ Workshop at Exeter. He lives with his family in coastal New Hampshire. 

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