Rivers Rising

I was talking with a friend (well, not talking, but almost) about his river. He reminded me of mine, that seductress who rises from and through time on the first page of her autobiography, Flow.

From within the fissure I rise, old as anything.

The gravel beneath me slides. Blueback herring and eel, alewife and shad muscle in to my wide blue heart, and through. The smudged face of a wolf pools on my surface, and for that one instant, I go blind.

Hemlock to either side. Nut trees. Laurel copses. The stony backs of snapping turtles on the shore, muskrat, shrew, and from the unlanterned forest, the bark of a fox, the skith skith skith of snakes over leaves, the prowl of a bobcat, and when it rains the rain is its own kind of song, not just a drumming, but a lyric.

Were there language, I’d be my own lone letter.