—"Every day, writing. No matter how bad.
               Something will come."—Sylvia Plath

 

Both my feet lodge at the river edge.
Water eddies around them.
There’s a sinking into the soft mud.

Catfish—the colloquial hornpout—
circle in the stir.
No return to prior stillness.

A water-soaked deadhead log
of old-growth timber, full of memories,
floats in the deeper channel

—vertical—as a human would tread
water. A poet, I could call to it,
ask its situation, destination,

its ancestry, its source,
Have you come from very far?
But it follows its instinct—
             downstream, and getting away.

If left to mire, the muck will cover
me ankle deep. The current’s swift.
The snowmelt cold.

And the watercourse pulses
like ragtime syncopation. Possibility.
I beg the slippery hornpout, Sting.