River runs another river bigger to
great floods: 1902, ’35, ’68
and here, on camera
a reporter floats his jon boat down
some Main Street
equal as a soothsayer to—
give it a few hours—
top edge of
drug store! Pizza joint! A window display
flush with fancy shoes! I mean
it keeps raining. He’s already
huge with those two oars, gone
strange looking down the swirling
brown depth to pavement below, giddy
the up-all-night-flashlight-
in-the-teeth of it, the damp microphone of it.
River rats too, at the bank, in weeds
but wow, can they swim—imagine—bobbing
shiny near some water-logged piano.
Then he remembers this life:
I’m afloat in the town-middle of nowhere enough.
Weeks and weeks before such a river
rethinks the business of
going south properly, hundreds, those
thousands of miles to the sea.
The sea. Just the sound of that thrills
the land-locked at
heart, by blood, all the way to the start
of the world—
And back: what a fish
told one of us. Astonishing
terrible things.