A river so slow, you can practically step in the same spot twice.
Its will is faint—
having been shackled
and placed elsewhere, again and again. Same tankers, same quays
running with the same
same blood.
Penned in by highways, strip malls, mixed-use development. Confused by a dam.
It can’t remember
where it wanted to flow.
It’s like a runt crowded out at the teat.
It nuzzles the fence at the back of the petting zoo. Never coming when called.
In our infinite self-regard, we think it’s like us — an animal hurt into thought.
It thinks:
They choke me with invasives, knotweed, mute swans,
water chestnuts mistaken for lilies.
They throw things inside me
styrofoam cups, plastic bags, plastic forks, rotten shoes, empty pens, broken pens, shit.
But it doesn’t complain.
Winter comes. It heals over with ice.
Spring comes and it swells with relative health.
Understand that when I call it “it” I give it the highest designation.
A baby is born, and a mother begins her long mourning
when pressed to give the baby a name. What will it answer to?
And yet she knows any name will
narrow its being.
The Massachusett, the Nipmuc, the Pawtucket called it Missi-Tuk,
Great Tidal River. And so it’s been
mistaken. Mis-took and mistaken.
There’s a boy on its banks crying out in frustration.
He drags the river with an enormous magnet
pulling up a shopping cart he is too small to heave out onto its shore.
There’s a woman on a bench
dragging her thoughts. Pulling them out one by one to look at them as one might
examine one’s own scars.
Then the woman gets up and approaches the boy.
Helps him detach the magnet from the wheel of the shopping cart.
It’s okay to let the shopping cart go, she says. There will be other rivers.
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