I entered the rain school, mud and water—
where the words were almost sensings, splashed,
a sibilant cool stream—that summer
when the river’s tongue grew thick and frothy
and the town afraid. The city fathers
gathered on the banks to watch it brim,
the Lackawanna feeding on itself.
The women closed in circles of despair,
imagining a planet dowsed and drowned,
a biblical demise. I gorged my ankles,
trekking by myself, a slop of steps
through silt that left no open-ended vowels,
a vanished printing. Wading, I was
far out, plunging in the mud,
the subsoil gouged and healing underneath.