Anything the River Gives

Basalt, granite, tourmaline, the male wash

of off-white seed from an elderberry,

the fly’s-eye, pincushion nubbins yellow

balsamroot extrudes from hot spring soil,

confetti of eggshell on a shelf of stone.

Here’s a flotilla of beaver-peeled branches,

a cottonwood mile the shade of your skin.

Every day I bring some small offering

from my morning walk along the river:

something steel, blackened amber with rust,

an odd pin or bushing shed by the train

or torqued loose from the track, a mashed penny,

the muddy bulge of snowmelt current.

I lie headlong on a bed of rocks,

dip my cheek in the shallows,

and see the water mid-channel three feet

above my eyes. Overhead the swallows

loop for hornets, stinkbugs, black flies and bees,

gone grass shows a snakeskin shed last summer.

The year’s first flowers are always yellow,

dogtooth violet dangling downcast and small.

Here is fennel, witches’ broom, and bunchgrass,

an ancient horseshoe nailed to a cottonwood

and halfway swallowed in its punky flesh.

Here is an agate polished over years,

a few bones picked clean and gnawed by mice.

Here is every beautiful rock I’ve seen

in my life, here is my breath still singing

from a reedy flute, here the river

telling my blood your name without end.

Take the sky and wear it, take the moon’s skid

over waves, that monthly jewel.

If there are wounds in this world no love heals,

then take the things I haul up—feather and bone,

tonnage of stone and the pale green trumpets

of stump lichens—are ounce by ounce

a weight to counterbalance your doubts.

In another month there won’t be room left

on the windowsills and cluttered shelves,

and still you’ll see me, standing before you,

presenting some husk or rusty souvenir,

anything the river gives, and I believe