This river ground to quiet in Sylvana.
Here, the quick birds limp and age
or in flight run out of breath and quit.
Poplars start and then repeat the wind
and wind repeats the dust that cakes the girl
who plays a game of wedding in the road
where cars have never been. The first car
will be red and loaded with wild grooms.
August rain says go to blackmouth,
violate the tin piled derelict against
the barn and glowing like the luck
a fugitive believed until he found
this land too flat for secrets
and the last hill diving on him
like a starved bird. The crude dike,
slag and mud and bending out of sight,
left gray the only color for the sky,
wind the only weather, neo-Holland
printed with no laughter on the map.
That hermit in the trailer at the field’s
forgotten corner, he has moments, too—
a perfect solo on a horn he cannot play,
applauding sea, special gifts of violets
and cream. In bed at 5 P.M.
he hears the rocks of children on his roof
threatening his right to waste his life.
With the Stilli this defeated and the sea
turned slough by close Camano, how can water die
with drama, in a final rich cascade,
a suicide, a victim of terrain, a martyr?
Or need it die? Can’t the stale sea tunnel,
climb and start the stream again
somewhere in the mountains where the clinks
of trickle on the stones remind the fry
ending is where rain and blackmouth runs begin?
Now the blackmouth run. The Stilli quivers
where it never moved before. Willows
change to windmills in the spiteless eye.
Listen. Fins are cracking like the wings
of quick birds trailing rivers through the sky.