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.
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