1

Those shallow awful rivers, I can read
the rocks in them that when the flood comes gnaw,
knock, bite a bridge like rifle-shots; up here,
the airplane rocking sidling through the early
summer black air, I read those rivers, that
ache of the mountains waiting for disaster
that you just hold up in your hands.
                                                               You say,
“The river”; you say, “The fire on the mountain”; you say,
“The catbird,” because it was singing yesterday
more rain.  The mountains hunch up from the cloud
taking the river down; the long cloud drifts
taking the river down; the green trees shake
taking the river down; the plane jolts out
of all that river taking down your life.

2

A box of photographs, old gray, old white
splotches of faces, slate-gray flop hats, garden-
variety elegance, stiff, passé, the streets
my father drove through, fifty a hundred years
gone by, swathed in a wash of mud that creek
and river lay down on the mercury
and tintype witness.
You’re far gone.  You’re down
the river now, some that were lost quite down
the river spew, subsidence, froth, and some
far down the river.  Then your faces go,
then your account-books, then your diaries, then
your works and habitations, there they go
to follow you along the silt and reeds,
snow-melt and whisper, rain, the surge that night.

3

In a studio photograph my oldest aunt
stands jut-jawed by her sister in the pram.
Eighty years later when her sister died
she wrote across the back of that dusk-orange
print how the pram was slung in a maroon
and puckered leather trimmed in silver with
the baby looking out, just looking out
moon-faced.
She hugs a parasol her daddy
bought her in Baltimore, and you can smell
the tannery stiff in it still.  That jut-jawed girl then
trundled her sister down to the river where
she was tipping her in.  “She stole my name,”
she’d tell that story to her face for years.
The river tries to wash away those stories.

4

The river tries.  I’d sicken on those names
my father and his sisters filled me up on,
and finger-fat boiled green beans, tomato piles
with pan-fried spit-wet chicken, August shivery suns,
wreckage of hills and trees, the spray of sawdust
and then that wet moon when the chill night tastes
your face, I’d not talk anyway, it smelled
so smoky-ripe.  The only thing that tries
to keep you clean’s the shale and reticence
of that low river running past the town,
the shallow breath and whisk of it that’s no
part of the town and looks up to it black
in nothing that’s to say.
The river tries
to say it for you, then one day it does.

5

I’m like my aunt.  Our only friend’s the river
after they stole our name.  Out in our place
the bridges they call stories cross and leave
us underfoot, it takes some time to take
bridges like that away.
Bridges establish
people in stories; here the town can brew
socials and sermons, barbecues and biscuits
and backyard beanpoles.  Wet smokes stir from breakfast
woodstoves those early mornings when we dream
the rooster’s in our ears.  Talk walks and talks
the valley but it doesn’t hear the river
till old snows loosen, trickle at night and boil
white and black waters taking streets and mouths off.
Our only friend’s the taking of that rise.

6

Bridges establish people up and down
those flats and hills.
Some folks walk slow and as
their shamble edges after them upriver
you lean across your fan, the front porch looks
cozy on down that dusty street and talks
about his father a hundred years ago
in that same piece of Billytown that he
still lives in, that his uncle used to sweep
the front walk of the Presbyterian church,
there’s Browntown up the hills back of them, Black
Marg’ret lived up there—words that rubbed the bridge
back of my tongue.  Now Billytown and Browntown,
now that the flat’s gushed through that bridge, look high
and dry down on those river-wrenched-off walls.

7

After the third flood my family
counted as the third flood, that took the bridge
down in a rubble of memory on the rocks,
they auctioned off the pieces.  My father who
would every year return, every year
make himself big and talk his town, bought him
a fluted plinth and took it north and set
it in his flowers.
It was the flood and what
the flood was tearing out of his small body
before he died, before they died, the people
that he could tell his stories to until
he died, and then his sisters died and all
his town died.  Now I mount a sundial on it
that shoots and steers the river of the sun.

8

You let it take its courses, that is how
you live by the river and die by it.  Hot summers
when you were children out you’d go, the chill
rocks froze your toes, the thin weeds whipped past your ankles
and further out, at last, you could sink down
and sit down deeper than waist deep, then the laze
and chuckle of the river hummed around
your sun-stunned dust-heaped faces.
                                                      Then you age
and the years lay down a thicker living on you,
meantime the silt sops up the courses, weeds
heap up across the moss-slick rocks and mud
fills in the pool.  Iced tea upon the porch
confronts the sun till one night all the courses
come for your childhood, livelihood and home.