The River Refuses the Past Tense

It remembers the factory
before it was called historic.

It remembers the treaty
signed in a room without windows.

It remembers the first boy
who skimmed a stone across its spine
and believed persuasion
was a form of physics.

Today it carries a sheen
that impersonates light.

A heron stands ankle-deep in patience.
Its reflection fractures:
two birds, neither certain.

I kneel at the bank
and press my hands into the mud.
The water smells like metal and rain.

My grandfather said
a river is a sentence
that never ends.

But this one falters
at the bend near the refinery:
syntax snagged on rusted pipes.

When I rise,
mud prints my palms:
a map I cannot translate.

The heron lifts:
white stitching the sky;

and for one brief seam of air
the river closes its wound.

 

David Anson Lee