River at Dawn
Trees bracket the empty
parking lot. I leave my car
near the path, gravel
scrapes
underfoot, then the river’s
rising sound. A low
bridge, my
palms against the damp wood
railing, my boots flat on
wet planks.
A deep inhale of cold,
green air.
The water presses itself
through the
narrow channel under my
feet,
talks in a soft voice
about the
white coffee cup on the
sill above
my empty bed, about the
black sky
over the highway that
morning, about
a long-past summer’s visit
to the same
river—cold plunge off a hot
grey boulder
then a walk through the
trees, my shirt
my hair drying in slants of
sun.
Hot
Red Mud
Mississippi
Summer’s day,
steam
rising off hot red mud.
We
made our way along river’s
edge,
unstuck our shoes from the
gunk,
cursed the red clay that clung to
our
soles, smeared itself across our sweaty
palms.
Rounded a bend, saw up on the bank
a
patio, snub noses of SUV’s, a wire fence where
the
sweet sweet neck of a pool skimmer poked up. But
we
pressed on, had to find our friends, though I thought
‘for
sure we’ve gone past the appointed place’. Then I noticed
she
was missing. I looked around: her long legs marched up the
bank,
folded over the fence, plunged into the pool—I followed, we
followed.
And as more and more of us poured ourselves in, the water filled
with
blooms of clay, became the same color as the river, the same color as our skin.
*
Originally published in
the Spring 2016 edition of Third Wednesday Review