Sewanee Review

Hard not to think old brown has got it right,nose up in current, its tail sculling tight curves,nothing seen but what’s coming fast downstream.So easy to get pulled back, so easy to get waylaid,bickered by thought. Not old brown, traveling lightfrom blackness under the flicker of river stones.What if I could last the cold, nourishing a hungerborn of depth and surface, stillness and flash,both old and young in my watchfulness, what then?

He could have been a discharged soldieror a wayward sailor in bed in a tropical hotel,staring at wooden fan blades. A storm is afoot.The jalousie windows shuttered. Giant crabsscuttle all night across a road. Many will die.He would like to be asleep, but the man upstairsis drunk again and angry about something.The rain when it comes brings a heavy weightas if it were an ocean pouring over the roof.In the morning the sea grape will look no different,each leaf lit with thick red arteries in the designof a tree, some say, much like the tree of life. [End Page 624]