River Lust

“A true conservationist is a [person] who knows that the world is not given by his [or her] fathers but borrowed from his [or her] children.”

John James Audubon

Photograph: Lower Lewis River Falls, located on the Lewis River in the Gifford Pinchot National Forest, Skamania County, Washington, October 19, 2009.

Photographer: Scott Weber

The River

I felt both pleasure and a shiver
as we undressed on the slippery bank
and then plunged into the wild river.

I waded in; she entered as a diver.
Watching her pale flanks slice the dark
I felt both pleasure and a shiver.

Was this a source of the lake we sought, giver
of itself to that vast, blue expanse?
We’d learn by plunging into the wild river

and letting the current take us wherever
it willed. I had that yielding to thank
for how I felt both pleasure and a shiver.

But what she felt and saw I’ll never
know: separate bodies taking the same risk
by plunging together into the wild river.

Later, past the rapids, we paused to consider
if chance or destiny had brought us here;
whether it was more than pleasure and a shiver
we’d found by plunging into the wild river.

Gregory Orr, “The River” from The Caged Owl: New and Selected Poems (Copper Canyon Press, 2002).

“Pick a piece of wood floating in the river and follow it down the current with your glance, keeping the eyes constantly on it, without getting ahead of the current.  This is the way poetry should be read: at the pace of a line.”

Vera Pavlova, from “Heaven Is Not Verbose: A Notebook” in Poetry (vol. CC no. I, April 2012)

Translated from the Russian by Steven Seymour

II

And somewhere below the light bevel
of its watercourse an undercurrent
quarries through acres of sand, gouging out
a barge road in mute, invisible, in-
cessant bursts, which is how we imagine
conscience works, rivering the mind until
the mind’s capacities are shaped by it.

Sherod Santos, section II from “Wing Dike at Low Water” in The Pilot Star Elegies (W. W. Norton & Co., 1999)

Photograph: The Missouri River at daybreak (specific location and photographer not identified)

“There is great pleasure in discovering a river; but sometimes serendipitous discoveries please the most. There are rivers that simply must be stumbled upon …”

Ted Leeson, from The Habit of Rivers (Lyons Press, 2006)

Photograph: an unidentified spot from one of the three rivers (Argentina, Capriolo, & Corte) whose confluence is located near Triora, Italy.

Photograph: Old stone jetty on the River Shannon, Ireland, July 2007.  Photographer: Hauke Steinberg

Legend of the River Shannon

According to Irish legend, Rowan trees once dropped their bright red berries into a sparkling well full of salmon. Fish that gulped the fruit would gain red spots and great wisdom, and men labored to catch and eat these “fish of knowledge.” But women were barred from catching the salmon.

One day, however, a brave rebel name Sionan caught and ate one of the wise fish. The next moment, a great flood burst from the well forever carrying her westward to the sea.  So did Ireland’s longest waterway, the River Shannon, earn her name.

Image: Salmon weir on the River Shannon, Ireland.

“A yellow light on a large spread of water is the most beautiful still object I know.  The most beautiful moving object is a river.  Odd that both of these should be water-images.”

—James Dickey, from “Journals” in Sorties (Louisiana State University Press, 1971)

Photograph: Unidentified river in Germany.  Photographer: Eckhardt Borzym, n.d.

“What a view … The river was blank and mindless with beauty. It was the most glorious thing I have ever seen. But it was not seeing, really. For once it was not just seeing. It was beholding. I beheld the river in its icy pit of brightness, in its far-below sound and indifference, in its large coil and tiny points and flashes of the moon, in its long sinuous form, in its uncomprehending consequence.”

James Dickey, Deliverance (Houghton-Mifflin, 1970)

Usk

So we’ve moved out of the years.
I am finally back upstream
and, but for their holiday grins
on every bookcase, the boys
were never born, it was a dream.
Here is where my past begins

in a garret beside a bridge,
woken by birds pecking moss
from the dark. The river’s clear.
It will not turn to sludge
till it reaches you and the mess
of streets I hated, endured

only because you were there.
My windows are full of leaves.
There are mountains in my skylight.
Perhaps you would like it here.
It is the same river—it moves,
perhaps, towards the same light.

Paul Henry, from Poetry Wales (Autumn 2011)

Photograph: River Usk, South Wales.  Photographer: Lynette Evans

Your River

for Eve, on the Chattahoochee

Your river has wish in it, and rain
and mud and twigs and the trees’ lost leaves.

Oh, it’s not really your river, but still
you widow it, walk beside it some.

Your dogs think the river is theirs,
bark at the birds and fish, swim sticks

across where it’s deepest in their mouths.
It’s not really their river, but nights

they breathe the dark house at its bend asleep.
And the green barn dreams your gone husband’s dreams—

joist and beam, the sweet machines
in the sweet repose of rust and weeds

—oh wheel, oh hope, oh grass grown deep.
Today I circled the meadow a hawk

in the river’s lifted dress, this wind.

Cecilia Woloch, from Mississippi Reivew (v.38 n.1&2, Spring 2010)

Photograph: Mountain laurel in bloom along the Chattahoochee River, near Cochran Shoals.  Photographer: Carl Donohue

“You do not see the river of mourning because it lacks one tear of your own.” —Antonio Porchia

“To ancient Chinese fancy, the Milky Way was a luminous river—the River of Heaven, the Silver Stream.”  — Lafcadio Hearn

Photograph: Milky Way above the Snake River.

“I am an intelligent river which has reflected successively all the banks before which it has flowed by meditating only on the images offered by those changing shores.”  —Victor Hugo