The River

Inside the water where they float or sway in their rusting roots are horse tackle, buggies, unhinged parts of eighteen wheelers, a girl on a tricycle, her bones still cycling in the drifting meld circle squirrel and possum pelts, The sludge of a dredging flow tows bodiless pockets of former times. No one can tell what is missing, what is still surfacing, what is now lathered into womb-bearing suds. A wake nibbles banks, it heaps up headless pomades, a filigree of funnel cake, cotton candy, half drunken sups of rum, antedeluvian arrow heads, the painted missing parts of the once and will be. A momentous loss drifts by, is found by stooping gulls, their screams almost musical on a carousel wind. Under the brittle reeds late summer copulates with eddy, churn and jism. There are corroding blooms between spent shotshells, condoms colonize cattails, belt buckles beckon to forsaken underwear that blossom now like pale squid. The river slops together every wind-plowed recipe, blends the newly-unearthed with the long abandoned. A backwash seeps moon-spills, or drives a John Deere deeper into boggy entrails, while barges slowly push each muddy footprint toward empty shoes, sunken slippers, pumps, loafers and boots dropped somewhere between Pittsburg and the Mississippi yet still moving along.