Really, I can curse the river
all I want, damn
how it ribbons with ease
over the dark rock bed.
Like the river, my heart is
a hybrid of unknowable things.
You don’t know my mother,
yet know her illness
in me. Sometimes, I make her mistake
of seeing hell in the calmest faces.
Follow me here. Death, for a time,
quits the neighborhood, though
its comedy still exists
in irreverent epitaphs. By now,
someone should tell the river
to shut up. But we’ll let it
say its peace: everything
we can omit later.
image: Aaron Burch
