States of the River
after a series of 8 lithographs, Ellsworth Kelly, 2005
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river breaks you open
in this gallery of light you’d forgotten
water’s blood-warmth, the trapped
minnows’ sharp back-and-forths
their plump velvet you seined
with your grandmother’s ironed
white towels—pick up your voice
and sing pick up your bed
and walk or the story will hide in the river
you don’t follow
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above the generous & cobbled flow
gray-stone sky gulls soaring
updrafts you are flush with lessons
on ease & effort you soften
lift, wing over the sparkling
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January’s Wolf Moon
howls licks the Mississippi’s
cold black belly scattered light
ghosts of the hundreds lost
here, where one river couples with another
Sauk mothers and grandmothers
fleeing gun-flash children
strapped to their backs
the Father of Waters folding
over their bodies do we blame
the water or ourselves?
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once you squatted between boy-cousins
canoeing home from the limestone
bluff tough-guy-style mindful of black-
anvil sky, the smell of rain before
it spills distant lightning’s bright scars
swaggering
closer & closer
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can you imagine how deep the story?
word after word below the pulsing
crosshatch, a hungry current
every year a child dies
sometimes two together
one trying and failing to save
the other eddied down by mean
water
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the word is the work you want
to crawl into the way
when you were eight you learned
the dazzle of underwater gold,
chartreuse, emerald nothing
muted your uncle pulled you
out just in time, he said all you wanted
to rest in the hum of the glorious
undertow
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you are given a ribbon of shell
& rock & bone a river to hold
your head above water a prayer
caught in your throat
this stew this spoon, this
sundown effervescing into glistening
waves rocking you
awake
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headwaters begin without intention
the child follows a meander of glint
you don’t expect to love
but you do you remember
someone called this the mystical
brotherhood of atoms
you slip off your shoes, step in & call it
river
—Sara Parrell
