When it hurts we return to the banks of certain rivers
—Czesław Miłosz
When a river’s crossed,
how many families hold their breath?
Breath-made rivers they cannot keep inside,
one after another, the only thought: Adelante.
Later, with children,
with hours of work wearing down the body,
these breath-made rivers run through
dreams and stories
they tell their children not to voice—
small faces hold still
while questions begin to course
and shadows dam the back of the throat.
*
I have made a myth of our river;
in telling the myth, one river becomes
many rivers, the one my mother crossed
lost in the one I cross now
in ink. You can’t step into the same river twice,
but you can try:
the sound will grow, will lap and splash,
sound of displacement,
sound of will, of wanting, in your mind,
sound of steps going nowhere.
*
Water knows how to be lost,
has a need for it, just watch:
the rain is all scramble and clearing
of tracks; watch a napkin
over a puddle, how water goes for broke
to be lost,
clings, rises,
soaks the fabric, pretending part
like it does in clouds that grow, give,
and clear.
*
Shadow is a kind of water
in that it knows one way to be lost:
Just wait, it says, just wait.
*
Water knows its way to truth:
you can see what lies at the bottom
of rivers, you can wash away the dirt
to see your hands again. Water is, then, not
the truth but a way to it; shadow then
is not a lie but something also passing over truth.
Down the street at noon, you cannot look around
without seeing others making the same, strained face.
A country also knows its way to truth,
but can choose to pass over it.
In this country of water and shadow,
truth is strained from our faces.
*
My mother turns to water on the phone,
the river of her voice carries the years between us,
years where I have strained to catch
something of our changing faces.
The river of her voice is a kind of truth I know,
I see what lies at the bottom of these years,
I wash away the dirt
and see my hands tremble.
*
Water knows how to be lost,
has a need for it, but it cannot choose:
a river runs to ocean
and is not lost, just ocean;
a river runs dry and is lost,
you think, but later it returns,
and only then do you ask
what is a river, but never answer,
happy to have the river.
People know how to be lost to others,
crossing rivers helps.
People know, but they must choose,
and, even then, they are not lost
to themselves. Mother, you brought me
with you over water,
over a way to truth,
over the distance of your shadow,
and in shadows now we wait
for the other to call.
*
Sometimes she calls in tears,
and like an earthworm when the rain comes
and fills its burrow, a part of me
works itself out to the surface to breathe.
I can hear the water in her words,
flooding sentences of love
and regret cloud what I know
how to say. Whatever actual clouds
in the distance between her and I
rearrange as she continues
to break and give herself over
to the ten or fifteen minutes it takes
to grieve that one cannot grieve,
no hay tiempo,
tus hermanos, esta casa
nunca está limpia
no ves
Cuída bien
esa niña tuya
Lo siento
no hablamos suficiente
deberíamos
gente muere, ¿sabes?
I know
this voice from other nights,
other cold moments when I’ve stopped
in my life to listen, drummed
out from the dirt of where I live
and made to gleam like rain
and worms, glass bottle shards,
the hard face of a television
clicked off to leave a house quiet
but for the pleading half-whisper,
half-snore of a woman
with no time to grieve.