COLLINS FERRY LANDING
for my father
Only rivers bottom out like this.Only rivers bottom out with this kind of conviction.Not humans, or, at least, not humans asindisputably human as you were,trapped in consciousness’s surplus, exilic,animalized absurdity, writhing in its contradictions—you, the shyest person we hardly ever knew,the solitary we hardly ever knew.You the fatalist. Your favorite sentence“It is what it is.” (Yes, it is, it really is.)Only the negative constructions pertain with you.Nothing to allegorize or ring changes onwith you. Nothing occluded. Nothing with whichto make analogies or metaphors.Never not meaning what you said, never not transparent.Never could you have been like this river,acquiescent to, and companionable with, Earth,supple, reconciled, patientwhile trapped between the high banks,narrowing itself, widening itself,sinuous through the industrialslag heaps on either side, coal barges booming down its waters—and placid and fructifying among the farms.Never you with dynamics like this,rushing limpid from the foothills;soft-singing in the valleys;oozing, opaque, mercuric through the marshland,silvery, satiny, emollient, satisfied;the rippling and dissimulating liquid medium—not apparent to the flesh like you but the illusoryreflective surface into which we fall and drown.Don’t even imagine the flexibilities,the insinuations, the dragon and the serpentand the river beside whichyou nursed that despair the three of us who loved you bestcould never coax you away from.The cold but intact rainbow trout under the ripplesare doing what? Feeding? Dreaming? No.They are concentrating. They don’t need earsto hear your ghost, thrashing and muttering in the brushbetween the river and the road—your ghost coming back to the place you might havethought you should have died(all alone were you with your disappointments)but didn’t, your ghost afraid to go back to where youshouldn’t have died but did. I met him up there.We were shivering up there together. He asked me,“How did I get here?”“How do I get back?”“Where do I go now?”
