The river is not a road so is an invitation
for the mind to roam the spaces between
cities where mines still pine like bulbs
for a springtime-worth of weight.
Don’t all seeds long to blossom
their coiled code? Even the dead
don’t know how to stay
closed, worming as they do, rooting
as they do. Leafing new
into the same sweet light.
The river reveals nothing
of where things vanish to,
only the ghost-pool
of my own gaze.
This date knives
right through, passes
like any other day. My body changes,
but less vividly. I can only call it healing.
I can only heal, as the battlefields
this river feeds do, scabbing green
over the soldier graves, the child graves,
there is nothing it can’t stomach
into fuel. It should be easy to stomach
loss the size of a walnut,
an apricot, when there are more atoms
in my body than stars
in the known universe. I don’t know
if we are the reflection
or if God refracts nightly into stars
to shame us. Either way, we’re mostly space
and survival. We can only stay dead
a little while, before green muscles in
to wake us.