Water flows by,
Quietly polite.
Green under sunlight,
Silver at night.

Is that my monarch's head
Shimmering between wakes?
She looks down and kisses Georgian rooftops.
She dives and twists her celestial face.

But as rain falls my monarch distorts,
And in the first snows she poses for me.
And as we celebrate new solstice a hail of thin ankles bruises the water.
Fish dart from them.
Sharp stones bury themselves so as not to offend.
I remember my feet in there...

All the times comes past here.
All the times yet to come.

I cross a bridge and the town's vein is out of sight.
I breathe the smell of ecclesiastical ceremony
And the cut-grass stench of various friendships nurtured and deflowered.
I mimic footprints that I've pounded into the ground.
The same drunk campaign.
I drink the river and become its flavid run-off.

Water flows by,
Timeless in flight.
Not at the front of my mind,
But in sight
As I recross the bridge.

I'm accustomed to its murky silence.
The distant, sporadic car horns.
Avoided emergencies, obnoxious goodbyes.
I hear them all.

I smell fuel emissions and nocturnal suffering.
I taste staling alcohol and summer's fruits.
I see the town that has cradled me.
I pick at its foliage and try to feel something.

I'll remember praying for floodwater.
I'll remember plains and peaks.
I'll remember the wall that can't hold it all.
The long, loud day
And the long, quiet sleep.