Sitting in a bathtub full of red,
I knew I had been disowned
by the waters of my youth.
No more would I wade into
the shallow green waters of the Blue,
tiny rocks and the shells of long-dead
mollusks digging into the soles of my feet.
I drained myself into the water,
imagined my blood swimming in the Brandywine,
swirling in the dark near the bottom of the Delaware,
letting go of itself, finally, as it flowed into
the arms of the end of the world,
as it broke upon the waves of the grey Atlantic.
Once, I caught a fish in the Cumberland,
I regarded its red-eyed terror with some of my own,
and when we threw it back, I wondered if it would live,
enduring in the water, a new scar in the soft flesh of its mouth,
an amulet against future harm, a fear of hooks dangling within reach,
and black shapes silhouetted against the bright noon sun
as it skimmed across the surface of the stream.
I never threw a hook in the water again,
but I found myself, time after time, drowning
in the palm of someone else's hand,
all for want of a river that would keep me
safely ensconced in its dark secret places.
Like the fish, I dreamed of hooks.
Imagine the end of the world.
Downtown in the dark,
the filthy Ohio snaking its way through the shadows
that fall upon the river valley.
The girl stops to smell the scent on the air,
but she doesn't quite understand what it means.
She has smelled it all her life, putrid water,
but she has never stopped to contemplate the source of it.
She never thinks she will have time to get to know the river intimately,
the way it will caress her slackening skin,
all of the days they will spend together,
on her journey to join the great brown Mississippi,
the river taking as much of her as it can get,
keepsakes to remember her by. It loves, as much as it can.
It loves the fields, the fishermen, the boats.
But most of all, it loves the girls no one wanted,
the girls no one could find. It holds them in its waters,
and when the time comes, it gently lets them go.
The city of my childhood glows white in the Midwestern sun.
The river running beside it is ugly, but not,
shimmering with diamonds of light that float upon its brown surface.
This is the river that breaks a continent in half.
It could take your home if it wanted to, your town,
everything you ever loved and anything that ever meant something to you.
It could break you, like the continent, only it would be easier.
You can cross the bridge, but you can't look down.
You know the river is waiting below you, implacable and constant.
For thousands of years, it has eaten the dead,
and killed some of those it wanted before we had decided to let them go.
Its bottom is haunted by boats, its ghostwaters are dammed with the corpses of soldiers
from wars as important to the river as the dragonfly hovering above the surface.
I look upon this river in my dreams, and it knows me.
The reflection it shows me is dark but true.
All of the rivers have known me.
I whisper their names as my skin becomes saturated.
I pray to the rivers of my youth,
but, like god, they never answer.
Inspired by The Yellow Birds by Kevin Powers.
"In that moment, I disowned the waters of my youth. My memories of them became a useless luxury, their names as foreign to me as any that could be found in Nineveh: the Tigris or the Chesapeake, the James or the Shatt al Arab farther to the south, all belonged to someone else, and perhaps had never really been my own. I was an intruder, at best a visitor, and would be even in my own home, in my misremembered history, until the glow of phosphorescence in the Chesapeake I had longed to swim inside again someday became a taught against my insignificance, a cruel trick of light that had always made me think of stars. No more. I gave up longing, because I was sure that anything seen at such a scale would reveal the universe as cast aside and drowned, and if I ever floated there again, out where the level of the water reached my neck, and my feet lost contact with its muddy bottom, I might realize that to understand the world, one's place in it, is to always be at the risk of drowning."
