Two Rivers

It’s Complicated: Lit Up & The Writing Cooperative Contest

It used to be that world and height
had made your face a frozen stream,
and ice and rock were poor disguise
for waters rushing black beneath,
so cold they’d burn whoever ventured there.

But down and down and further down 
(with gravity or other hid device)
the hand of chance has forced your life, down rapids
rimmed with rocks, hemmed in by pines:
the judgment of the forest on your fall.

You hurtle, desperate, noisy, roaring, cold
and frantic through the sentence of the winter.
There’s not a lot of summer in the mountains.

Once propped up high by granite cliffs of need,
a stream has hardly any hardest hope
of getting free of ice.

It takes a slipslide mad dash riot down,
a hellbent, hands up, wild toboggan through,
with love’s own weight behind you on the turns;
crack the whip, and sparks, and death awaiting
in the chutes for those who think to stop;
and ice floes open, break to bits the glacial
remnants of your ice age:

I am no Eliza on your ice.
I do not jump and hope those shards to hold me;
as likely that as try to stop your crash.
Not too very likely.

It’s my design to wait, instead, at bottom
of the steep. At mountain’s end, what shape
the waters take depends upon the matrix
of the earth, and earth receives the image
of the flood.

For even waters deltaed, deepened, warmed,
surrendered, broadened into noiseless calm,
and free of frost and vertigo and clash,

approach with power, multiplied and slow, 
the open glorious sea.