Riverspeak

 Riverspeak

In the arms of the river

crooning rocking

all things come to rest,

or get caught in the net.

Bodies and cowpies

moribund butterflies

mattresses endwise,

cast offs and discards

the rafting mind blind

throws tail over ear

to disappear;

yet the river's no acid-spate, 
no dimensional warpgate.

All of it

bloats

and eventually

floats.

July 2012

Posted for   FormForAll   at dVerse Poets Pub

where if I'm reading the clues on WaystationOne correctly, Gay asks us to write about writing about it all (ars poetica)

and also, for

the triumphant return of the

Friday 55

at the g-man's

Header image: River relection day, by tanakawho, on flick'r

Footer image: Danger, by Leo Reynolds, on flick'r

Robber's Rest

Robber’s Rest

Into the scruboak woods

you drove us

down the vanishing ledge

cut into the side of the creekbank

along the red sandy rim

until the road began to narrow

and play out.

“Stop! Stop!” I yelled but you drove on,

till the truck slid down the hill on splayed

wheels, like a dog on ice whose legs

fly out from under it

down to the weedy bottom

as darkness fell on

no way back

You walked off, shadow long

over the sucking sand
to look for a place to fish

(because you don’t, among other
things, hunt any more;

when you came back from

Nam you said it was

the deer’s dead eye

made you put down the gun)

I wandered into the woods

hearing a singing

where no one was

came upon the outlaw hideout

abandoned, ramshackle

in the dusk, broken walls of

round pocked cauliflower teeth

glowing like white headstones

in the graveyard of love

where I finally found

a candle

and a bed.

September 2011

Image: Scruboaks at Sunset, by joy ann jones 5/26/2010

On The River

On the River

A day on the river, processional, surrendered

in a shell of whispers, floating down a blue nave.

Leaf ceilings in the transepts lace like our fingers,

our heads bow over the side as if to worship

the spirit holding us up.

Jade waters full of secret life

blind back our defenseless eyes with

their shifting coat of surfaced silver,

a door of running glass we pass through

into moving darkness

full of quick fleeing shapes, green-glazed stones,

waving grass that clutches with hands and feet,

water babies swimming through our fingers, 

gloving us in their slickness,

cartwheeling to escape our careless giants’ grasp.

Minnows like chrome torpedos, mirror-sided

decorate the shallows, fishermen’s bribes

spinning vertical on their lips between the stones

like the ghosts between my thoughts

feeding there and shining.

This is a journey we do not

wish to disturb by any arrival.

Watchful faces in the high rock follow us

but not so thoroughly, so aptly, so archly

as the faces in our dreams.

The river loses and wins her mercurial battles

without any knowledge of a contest.

So it is in the river of your touch

where I spin silver, slick and never stopping,

carried from twilight to another dawn.

July 1989

Revised, March 2011

Posted for OneShotWednesday at the inimitable One Stop Poetry

Image: Boatman of Mortefontaine, by Jean Baptiste Camille Corot,
Jean-Baptiste Camille Corot [Public domain], via wikimedia commons