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| Near Flood, Contoocook River Peterborough, NH |
Resurrection Sunday
In his darkness then an epiphany:
such a love he must not fail.
Niall Williams
John
This particular river bulges with mountain
water
run-off. It is falling
with such
velocity, it makes great
mounds of
foam that float
& flail
in the crotches of a rock
& the sawn-off ithyphallic
branches caught there, watching
the rise of a body gorging on snow
melt twenty miles from here,
pushed in laborious rushes
of contractions and rests. And
also west of here, this limb’s
mother, this limb’s sibling
saplings. Imagine them quiet
in the sober quiet of their grove,
reaching up to touch their mother’s
one limbless spot. Her pruning wound,
renamed to cicatrix. Forgiveness,
in its measure, is callus tissue, in
time
the lid of an eye. Blind by then. Or
outwardly sightless should I say.
Inside, beneath the cambium,
a nob of love is forming, late
twin of the limb that by now may be
just
the right size at just the right
time
to be sunk by the mud & crush
of others
like it, & beaver pups touch it
like a talisman before their swim
out and against it all.
