Tell Me

 

Tell Me

 

It’s an awkward truth that I cannot help observing

and noticing things even in the most terrible moments.

                        Yiyun Li

                        Things in Nature Merely Grow

 

At what moment does the river give over

to the cold, and at what moment does it lift

its rhythm to the wind waving over it

& surrender, & in surrendering offer drops

 

of itself as sacrifice, & what drops volunteer

or what drops are drafted to the task of becoming

made invisible by light & by

that same light & after a certain encampment

 

fall again but different entirely, irrevocably

changed, or not at all, because how can it be, the same

water after all it’s literally been through and told to do.

At what moment, because rivers are memory,

 

does the body of it, remembering, say not now,

not this time, & pause to get hold of itself, to get

solid the way all bodies get solid from the very

start, a splitting but not a splitting, of its cell-f,

 

a selvedge edge now, at that moment, becoming ice

that rimes the banks with the seasons in its surface,

the banks and bottom a hollow consolation for August,

when the mud was caked & shattered & the rain,

 

when it finally fell, rose straight up again, the way

any inflated thing would do, bouncing on the hard

unyielding shell of the groundit sped to, on the pottery

shard, on the shell of the just hatched snapping turtle 

 

camouflaged…