Wynn Yarbrough
Water can’t bring him back but floating did.
He washes up to the bank with empty cans
crushed in his pockets, his neck pendulant
like a stick, breaking the water around him
like a bell. Aluminum cans don’t weigh him
down. Words do. He died with water filling
his lungs. His screams still bobbing where
the blood no longer moves. He was hungry
to feel the river, not to live in the swirl and vortex
of hunger, to feel, wrapped around him,
the dark, indistinguishable arms of nature.
Nightly, a blue heron loves nature too,
stands in the
water and feels at one with hunger
and the wrapping
of its hard thin beak around
the silver belly
of a small-mouth bass shooting
urine as highbeams,
teenagers cruise
these winding
roads for the death they won’t know.
Their searching
lights the way across the river,
their eyes flash
coins. The heron is silent
except for the
flapping of its feathery oars.
The river swallows
leaves and drunk bodies
without fear
or dislike: so the magic goes.
Can we believe rapture and the song this fall
is about bending:
what bends, what doesn’t,
what needs to?
Dusk, casting shadows, bending around
grey blue birds
the arc of a fish in the grips of death
the drunk bodies of boys & the beginning
of fall &
the leaves floating against their way:
little curled
arks free in the currents where
their freedom
washes them together and, soon, under.
You can taste the rhythm of loss in Sunday
drinking, in
the father who lets the sun set
on him, the light
coming through
the thinnest
portions of his flesh, through
the window where
he thrashes away and smokes
cigars and solders
wire and holds wood together,
floating down
the curves of the afternoon.
He isn’t trying
to bow to the darkness,
he welcomes it.
In the darkness, he can turn
the light on
and bear the loss of sunlight
with a little
more dignity than he did
the day before.
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Last updated: January 23, 2006.