It was almost black, the river serpentine— everything looked like it was coated in silver, much bigger than he imagined, as if the surface was somehow a river of birds. The moon was right there, and every part of it, calling.
It’s an ancestral memory, a sound he remembers from before he hears it.
How dark the water was, prehistoric, too loud, flung forward as the wave broke. The sky slips from peach to garnet to blood.
Who can say? Life is long out here.
Laura at dVerse asked us to alternate lines from one page in each of two books and construct a patchwork poem. My sources were:
She did not remember the way, but she remembered the times, the place. She wanted to connect present to past. She did not know how or where to begin, and yet she needed to try to construct that bridge. Words were all she had now.
Two ways, really, even though she always pretended they were the same. Or maybe it was only her longing that failed to understand that they were two, not one.
She had been dreaming of a river. A man, a boat. Trees, weeping, or was that her own voice, crying on the wind? It had been summer once. Flowered. Sweet.
But here was the river again, littered with fallen leaves. What magic word would turn back the seasons, dispel the haze, repair a lifetime that had already disintegrated into dust?
Was she coming or going? In her dreams a voice kept repeating you have to choose. But between what? Who? Did she get to choose who would be waiting on the other side of the river? Or was she to be the one left waiting?
to begin, become the current– sing its song
Brendan at earthweal has more to say about rivers this week and poses the question: What voyages are found there, which deities are vast in its depths? It made me think of my response to the Kick-About #61 prompt, which was Molly Drake’s haunting song, “I Remember”.
I wasn’t aware of Molly’s connection to Nick Drake, but when I learned that she was his mother, Molly’s song immediately made me think of Nick’s song “River Man”. I took the feeling I got from both songs–a kind of remembering intertwined with uncertainty, loss, and the passing of time–and wrote the above prose poem, adding a haiku coda for earthweal, and some water art from my archives.
The river has songs to fill every season. I turn with the circles, swimming the wind that chases the water, bending around the curves, following the changes in tempo and depth, bound to the ripples that radiate from every slight disturbance of the surface. Looking for the most efficient path.
I construct imaginary boats and then dismantle them, leaving the remains dashed and forgotten on the farthest shores. The river continues, reflecting the sky’s transformations, a window opening into the changing light.
Stilled, I try to capture the current as it passes by, to fill my pockets with the riddles it holds inside its voice, all the wisdom gathered from its ancient repeated journeys. I want to be cleansed of all the outside forces that try to bind me, to find again the center hidden somewhere inside that keeps escaping my grasp. But I am too far, too long, too hindered by my own noise. I have lost the lines and the point of the contents of my brain.
Let it go the river sings.
Not anything. But. And this too. What seems. To be. There. You are.
Brendan’s challenge prompt of rivers at earthweal brought to mind another recent post, consecration, that featured John Haitt’s title song as it’s coda. It, too, included the weekly words from Jane’s Oracle 2 generator.
And of course I can never have too much of John Haitt’s song.
Interiors are slowly
folding in—where do they go?–
invisibly departing
with each new exhalation
of air, to be reflected
in the afternoon sun, held
light on the wing of a bird,
to travel with the rivers,
following liquid paths that
enjoin our lost ways to sing,
reaching beyond the other
side, to become vast, unmapped,
unlocated everywhere–
to be cast out, opening–
What is it we seek?–the stuff
that accumulates, broken,
unrepairable, layered
over landscapes unable
to breathe? or will we become
unclenched, holding nothing but
earth wrapped up in endless sky?
Frank at dVerse challenged us to write a 7 line poem with a positive feeling. I’m not sure this exactly meets the positive bar, but it’s headed more that way than a lot of what I’ve recently written. I also used 7 syllables in each line, which I seem to remember as a form I saw somewhere, although I can’t remember where.
This is also my offering, off prompt, for NaPoWriMo. Art inspired by Diebenkorn.
K. 