A rut
is
what happens
when you
go
where
every
one
else
has
go
ne
this
is
still
true
when
you
follow
your
own
back
trail
too
close
ly
[photo: Bull Creek, Texas, taken 2016 by Mick Parsons.]
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Poet. Essayist. Fictioner. Steamboat fireman. Bit of a grackle.
January is a tease and I am tired of the feedback loop. Last week it felt like spring. This morning, the temperature kills indiscriminate, the jackboots of the season. The Belle of Louisville is being pushed home down a cold river, returning to dream and remember in spite of everyone’s desire to wake and make her forget. There is no cold quite like the one that creeps up through the soles of the boots and wool socks from cold metal deck plating. It grows up into the bones, a mycelial network that builds cold tendrils up into the medulla oblongata. The dream and memory infection lasts as long as the floating world and the water lasts. These legs are too accustomed to dry land and the cement is reaching up, too. In dreams just on this side of my eyelids I am rooted in place, arms stretched out and over, a preacher a prayer a poem, feet bound to the shore of my final baptism, denied.
But someday, the mycelium-like ties will cast me forth, set me free.
tie
d tie
d tie
d these
arms
stretch
stretch
stretch
ed &
tie
what
sacri
fice
what
is
burn
ed
what
is
tie
d
will
find
current
again
light strewn like stars
on the afternoon water
a mirror of mountains
a song of trains
pre-recorded
for the memory
of a grandfather’s dream
October clouds
spilled ink across the sky
we paint this day
with diesel, with aches
with pains -- we
who winterize the boat
who have watched her
in blizzards and floods
know more of the groans
the symphony of wind
that envelopes we know
more than spreadsheets
describe we know
the weight of the light
strewn like stars
we know
they are not strewn
for you
