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Great
Falls
We stood on the bridge that
passed over
the first run of rapids shooting through Great Falls.
Fish sometimes popped out of the white water.
You christened everything below us God's Vas Deferens
and the fish became The Sperm of the Lord.
A few kayakers die in that water each season, even
one boy I had vaguely known, knocked against the rocks
and drowned, his body dredged out down river
where the water's tamer. I guess that's what happens
when you try to ride God's Vas Deferens, you said.
Looking at the gap below us, all the rocky drops
in the water, I couldn't see how anyone would do
anything but die in there. Odd sticks and brush hang along
the rock faces some feet above the water, marking
where the floods crested this spring. Higher up the wall
is another scattered line of grit from a past spring
of rains worse than any we've seen the last few years.
I told you how bad the floods were the year I spent upriver,
north of Harper's Ferry, how for the three worst days of it
my friend and I were stranded at her riverside
lean-to of a cabin, the only dirt road out flooded
into an undriveable muck, and how we sat on the step
watching loosed trees and doghouses float along,
wishing we had a tape measure to mark the water's rise,
to calculate how long we had before we started drifting too.
What I didn't tell you was how, in our second night there,
I found the letters she'd dug into the rough landscape
of her inner thigh, scars like bramble, like braile, words
I couldn't make out for all the darkness around us,
but understood from how thick she'd gouged each w and s.
And all the things I told her. And how on the first clear day
after the rains broke we rose and went together
to the river's edge, past all the pith of the flood mark,
the same mark I showed you, to the scores of fish
dead in the ruts along the towpath, caught there
when the water seeped through the land and
back to the low river banks. We slipped
into the water the few who still chewed the air,
but they only flipped their dead and unmuddied
bellies at us, bobbing the smooth silver arcs
of their bodies down river as, all around,
we could smell the sunlight start to warm the others.
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