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Nervous-system tracings of rivers before dams—

to map watercourses is to diagram human hands

running in fingers to deltas. Neosho, Kaw,

Cimarron, Verdigris, Arkansas, Chickaskia.

Flood flow in spring, summer languid. Call

their names—conjure those whose language

they carry. Memory exists in nerves, lives in

rivers like silver-scaled great-horned serpent,

basilisk who admonishes our failures. Metaphor

reminds us that humans subsisted along rivers

immemorial. Recall, then, those dead metaphors,

breathe them back to life—river of time, river

of memory, river of life, river of blood, river of

song, river of death. River of contempt. Not the

same river, not the same woman—Heraclitus’

axiom along cattail-encumbered bank. Honor

rivers’ meanders, their currents our late-night

reveries that roar, crawl along, rush downstream,

and overflow, leaving mica scales behind. How

rivers sometimes get lost. How we all get lost.