After Jen Bervin / After Quan Barry

River spidering across the wall, sailing 

through the air. River flashing with silver 

sequins fastened to sunbeams. River always 

in pieces, a torn ribbon streaming everywhere.

River carving out a canyon through the years, 

seen from a sudden grassy overlook, 

an old bridge, a new shoreline, endlessly

crossing and recrossing our lives. River 

this winter with sixteen eagles alert 

and searching. River unfrozen and pooling 

around the ankles of trees in springtime, 

daring us closer. River asleep inside 

the black night like a spent lover, 

dreaming of being a chandelier of rain, 

first velvet wet drops on bare skin. Go, 

go on. Conveyor belt of clouds, destroyer 

and preserver of towns, longest breath 

of the earth, tell us what floating means 

to you. Some trees are weeping, river. 

Speak of all you carry and carry off

in river song and river silence. Be horse, 

be ferry, carry us from now to next to. 

River, I’m done with fading shadows. 

Give me daylight broken and scattered

across your fluid transparent face, 

come meet me with the moon and the stars 

running and tumbling along your sides. 

River swinging open like a gate to the sea,

time’s no calendar of months, you say,

but water in the aftermath of light.  

Your drifting cargo tells us everything 

arrives from far away and long ago 

and ends in the body, boat of heartache 

and ecstasy we pilot, in quest of passage also. 

River we call Mississippi or Mekong, 

sing us forth to nowhere but here, 

with your perfect memory be our flood.

Diagonal paths quadrisect a square acre

white as the page in February.

From the soil of this basic geometry

ash, elm, and maple flourish like understandings

whose bare logics are visible,

understandings the theorem has allowed.

Between roam bodies of the sensible world:

people, dogs, all those lovers

of the material and immaterial

illumined, as under working hypotheses,

by sodium bulbs whose costly inefficiencies

Los Angeles and Philadelphia have apparently

moved on from.

The trees are grand hotels closed for the season.

But belowground, social life is taking place.

As when snow lay on the fields

and people descended to rec rooms, secret bars

like the Snake Pit in the basement of the curling rink

in Golden Prairie. Our big Ford nosing the siding,

we waited for our parents with the engine running,

under grave instruction

as radio sent our autonomy bounding toward us,

chilling scenarios inspired by the trucking forecast

and news items from Great Falls or Bismarck

freely imagined, songs that gave us bad ideas

and the seeds of a mythology. Ten minutes,

then one hour, two,

pop and chips and the gift of the periphery.

I've never understood what “starlit” means.

Even on a clear night in their millions

they cast no discernible light

into the dark expanse where a farmhouse gestured weakly

and grid roads and bullshit caragana disappeared,

where the animals’ lives played out,

smells travelling slowly, low to the ground.

In Riverdale Park the diagonal walks like diagrams

may be said to describe themselves,

which is a relief.

Now snow is blowing through the theorem

that the understandings broadly accommodate

and sensible bodies adjust their collars to,

and even bare spots left by departed cars evidence

how the outlines of loss might gradually alter

as experience is filled in by its representation,

even if not made peace with.