Ally says:
The River Fell in Love
Maybe it was the boots. Or
the clothes, or the current.
It probably didn’t
matter. The first time the water closed over his head, he almost laughed, a
smile underwater, the green swish swash of the river slipping between his teeth
and patting his tongue, but then he came back up, spitting an arc of green
water into the sky. It hit the setting sun at the peak and then broke apart
splattering like rain back into the low waves. Each drop chasing after its
sister, pit, pit, pit.
The fluidity of water
always amazed him. The way it came apart and back together, the way it finds
itself, recognized its other, like mercury does.
All the water in the
world leaked out of a cracked meteorite when the earth was a firestorm – a raging
baby ball of a planet. It was cooled by this liquid life, flowing out like the
yolk of an egg cracked over the pan. Water, water everywhere.
He titled back, trying to
float. A body at rest. His feet, boot-clad, dipped down and back and down and
back, a boat – his whole body a vessel adrift. Inside he was mostly water and
he could feel that water pushing against his skin, calling out to its other.
The river and his water-blood reached out, touching fingertips, tearful like
teenage lovers being wrenched apart.
His head went under
again. The river smiled. The river played him a song – not one of lovers or
heroes, which is usually the only kind of song the river likes to play but
instead under a fat yellow moon the river played him a song about a boy,
afloat; a boy, under a blackness punched through with starlight. A boy just like you, the river sang.
His feet go down first, weighed
down in his river-soaked socks and boots. It pulls at him teasingly, like a
lover begging him not to leave the bed at the sound of the telephone in the kitchen.
Stay, she says. Wait, she says, giggling and he laughs too, stalks of river
grass pulled from the bank tickle his cheek.
Stay, she coos, pulling
at the sheets that have tangled his naked waist, tripping him up, running a
long sharp finger down his spine. Not enough to hurt but enough to leave just a
white scrape through the finest layer of his skin. A mark.
A claiming.
The sky shimmers now,
light shifting, reflected again and again, in each individual drop. His shirt
floats up over his head and he tries to shed it but it proves too stubborn. His
legs twist with the current and again the river smiles, lifting her boy in a
dance. A tumbling dance. Over and under and over and under and dip and lean and
bend and sway. He is a good dancer and learns the steps quickly and the river
is pleased and pretends she is as vast as her mother, the ocean, and she does
the same pirouette – the same cartwheel, head, legs, head, legs that she has
seen her mother do. Twirl, my beautiful boy, twirl.
The boy jerks, spasms,
once, then again. The river reaches inside, kisses him, on the lips, into the
mouth, down the throat, the river kisses deep again and again. The boy closes
his eyes and when he opens them but the moon is gone, the water dark on all
sides, the planet indescribably old.
He feels the river hug
him, hard, pressing against his sides. He tries to turn away from her kisses,
but she twirls him again, and tells him she is in love. She pulls off one shoe
and he bobs for a second, close to the surface. He can see the moon again,
briefly, before the moon becomes just another spot that floats before his eyes,
just another drop of water separated and then rejoined in a message whispered
between this world and the Nothingness. High above, the moon looks down at
him and smiles. The moon is always happy when his daughters find new love.
Everyone deserves to be loved, the moon, thinks, tilting his eyes from the fading
boy and returning his gaze to all that never ending blackness.
Aleathia says:
In 1993 my friends took me to a hot spring for my birthday that required a river crossing. I nearly drown. It was an eye opening experience that spawned a novella which will someday turn into a novel. But today, you get a poem.
Vestige
I am a flesh accordion
being put away for the night
as cold water seeps over and under
my feet simultaneously. It is mercury.
I rise up, levitate, as if a cheap trick
at the magician’s fingers.
I am a river bottom vestige
when my body quietly slips
beneath a watery sky,
from ink to ink, writing an epitaph
on the rocks with my knees
about a life not yet lived.
Aleathia Drehmer
