I’m in the swim. I won’t swim across the River Styx
that is out of fashion, like the Phoenix
that lived 500 years. I am not merry
swimming to any kind of cemetery
dictionary.
I’d rather swim the Charles to a library
drink Bloody Marys with Christopher Ricks.
Toward an island of dancing skeletons,
I pole my boat, my passengers the seasons,
paradise offers eternal life without seasons.
It’s silly to think rivers belong to anyone.
It’s time to write about rivers I’ve known,
not underground, but rivers legible to mosquitos,
black flies, a beaver, the human eye—
poisoned, damned up. A stone’s throw
from their own riverbeds, they cry
out in pain, flood, are never foolish, groan,
know laughter, have children called brooks,
who, afraid, run to them, scribble on stone.
You who read and write books
with bays, waterfalls, tidal sentences, look
at a river that is a person,
who tells old wives’ tales about the ocean.
In the name of no Father and no Son,
I will never swim across the Don
or join Yeats bringing the Liffey swans
promised by his friend Oliver
when he swam across the river—
the Black and Tans’
bullets breaking water near his head like salmon.
(Gogarty loved a party, his bawdy poetry at Trinity
made him a favorite among the dons.)
Zeus, an eagle, flew over the Meander,
held Ganymede, a beauty, in His claws—
lightning and hail—a pause,
then thunder.
Some waters are feeders, some devour
wilderness in an hour.
The Ganges shows eternal mercy,
the dead set afire with floating flowers,
the River Jordan is salty, full of heresy—
bathe in it, get in the swim, with scribbled stone
glacial ideas broken
off from upriver mountains,
scrawled on rock “Give to the poor everything you own.”
I never tried to wash off my sins
I want to keep. Heaven is a small town.
God keeps His word
to rivers, that are oratorios without words,
half notes, quarter notes, clefs are fish and birds.
Whenever, wherever His day begins,
God’s day is not our day.
We are musical scores, we hear ourselves
say hello hello, farewell farewells.
May the last song I sing bring
joy and remembrance to others.
Rivers trust in the Beginning,
leave empty beds, their sisters and brothers.
Over the Yangtze there are bridge-temples,
sure as Buddha had big ears and dimples.
Bridges separated good life from bad death,
bad life from good death.
I sit near a bridge and watch the trees grow.
In China, the past is wherever you go.
I dive to find the great beneath.
I will not rhyme, I’ll swim freestyle to my death.
Come swim with me, idle readers,
spend a while under water. I notice
rivers flow to blue harbors under the ice,
cubist sunlight indifferent to changing seasons.
I see the curtain fall, actors in underwater theaters,
players in make-up, the cast: Allah, Jehovah, Christ.
You there, look for me in holy places, I shout
“praise the Lord,” among pickerelweeds and bottom feeders,
I’m clothed in spawn of many fish, on shore it’s rutting season.
I hold on to uncertainty, mystery, doubt
without any irritable reaching out
after fact and reason.