Two Rivers
I cross this river twice a day
at sixty miles an hour.
This city was built here
one hundred and eighty-seven years ago
at the confluence of these two great streams.
We know the names of the first settlers
and the first fort
But the lore of these rivers has been lost
Their names, Kanawha and Walhonde
Are only words on signs
No one even wonders what they meant.
Now these rivers are broad, grey channels
their banks neatly mowed
or covered with processed stone.
But one imagines great magnitudes
and asymmetric intricacies
long, laughing shoals
giant rocks
deep green pools
Virgin groves of overhanging sycamore and beech
Making shady tunnels.
Broad, teeming shallows
and places where the flow split into gnarled fingers
all untouched.
One imagines spawning runs
of monstrous, unnamed and vanished species
thousands moving against the current with a passion stronger than death
in answer to some silent call whose volume overwhelms them
Armies of dorsal fins slitting the frigid river’s surface
and scaly bodies, long as jungle snakes
slithering, twisting and flashing white over shallow rocks
and waiting in rows beneath a white curl of water.
So many that their migration
makes an echoing chorus of their million fin-whispers:
a seething, ocean sound
or like a steady rain on the river’s face.
One imagines painted tribesmen
wading with spears
impervious to the cold
seizing the day
and knowing the meaning of those names
Kanawha and Walhonde
In some language that had no word
for fence.
At 6:24 a.m.
On September 23, 2002
I saw this while crossing these rivers
at sixty miles an hour.
A great cloud of black birds
(I did not know their species)
Flew upstream from the bridge
a black morphing, whirling like a spirit unbound.
Dropping from the concrete piers,
they skimmed above the flat water
Racing upstream to some precise
but unmarked spot
just off the north bank
Was this an obedience to some ancient, ancestral memory
of some once fecund feeding water?
There they dove at the placid surface
in such numbers and force
that they tore the water
like strafing guns.
Then they ascended on a thousand vectors
and wheeled in lunatic circles
and dove again.
That is all I saw on September 23, 2002
In the eight seconds that I could see
As I crossed the bridge at the exit ramp
and dropped behind the office towers.
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