- How am I to explain my timidity?
- The lowered eyes, the weakened voice,
- the semi-semi-quaver of confidence.
- The river has sunk five feet
- in this month of April. Its water now is more clear;
- I can see the snags three feet
- below the surface. A friend calls
- and my throat tightens—almost all the laugh
- constricted at the bottom of the throat.
- Fish jump. Time. Relax and breathe.
- She loves me, I think, altho that
- is not the point. She loves me like the river.
- How can you love a river?
- All over the birds are chirping.
- Overcast, and a light spray fresh on my face,
- but to the east is a half-inch of blue sky
- and there in the light a white cloud.
- If I had a fishing pole I could define it
- in terms of fishing holes and places to stand,
- but I don’t fish. I watch them jump—a moment of water
- and silver-gray as I glance to the sound.
- Moma-bird flutters, nervous near her nest.
- It is not with timidity that I watch her.
- It is not with lowered eyes
- that I see cloud creep over the mountain
- in a distance gray, yellow, blue, deep blue.
- Time. And the light is a drizzle of rain,
- gray, light, filling the place between
- the river and the cloud.
- There is no time here for timidity,
- or there is no time. It is a place of becoming,
- a place of no ”it,” no ”there,”
- no time that was or ever will be,
- no time to dwell upon the past in dreadful anxiety.
- Kingfisher chatters and circles in front of me
- flying in the last yellow light, swift, windy, trim,
- and disappears upriver in the brush.
- River otter. Downstream. Blowing water from nostrils.
- Brother and sister swim within five feet of me—
- quiet, dogpaddle underwater, sleek in the water—
- and then backs arch, slide and they are gone;
- or they are not gone, for there is no time,
- and, under the river, no ”there.”