I Am River


I have carved canyons, eons and eons of canyons.
Glaciers let loose talus and scree to greet me.
Mountains of majestic purple cascade to meet me
on banks where leafing spring trees thrust thirsty roots.

I travel under granite cliffs and roiling gray skies
and below tranquil azure canopies where megaliths
lift up in supplication to Time and Eternity.
I have shaped striated, buff, undulant rock
into vivid quartzite of smoky rose that
big-shouldered men cut into fortresses, 
bulwarks against gods unpleased,
against men conjured as evil incarnate.

I have flowed deep, I have flowed angry.
I have flowed rapid, I have flowed peaceful.
Men know my powers and moods and  
they pray to me with their shiny talismans fabricated
on my concrete-and-steel-bound surging muscles.
They ford me but few times in their mayfly season,
flailing wildly at me and those they call enemy.

I go on because it is my nature.
I flow through their dams making power.
I flood onto their soil making it prosper,
nurturing fortresses into towns where families 
bury their dead under broad-leaf canopies 
that drink from me.

I am energy. 
I am life.
I am river.



I Knew A Hopi


who, as a boy one day,
worked feverishly in the family garden,
“like a white man,” he told me.
His Mom chastened, “Pray to the soil
as you dig. Be with it, not against.”

I thought of him the other day
as I drove my 28-year-old TV to the
recycling center. Its tube had 
failed deep into the digital age. 
I loved the programs I’d seen on it.
I loved to play tapes of those programs.
I’d spent more time with RCA than with
my closest relatives. RCA and I had
a relationship stronger and longer 
than the most fervent cellphone
users’ today.

Tears welled as I neared the center.
My faithful seeing eye machine no 
longer saw! It seemed obscene to dump
it like the day’s garbage. RCA had served
faithfully and well over a quarter 
century, an advanced old age for an 
American-made TV of its era.

The center had no chapel for a proper
tobacco ceremony, a burial sacrament,
even a simple eulogy, words from the heart to
confer the sacred on RCA’s demise. I felt the blood
quicken in my hands as I turned over RCA’s boxy 
last remains. Words surged from deep within.
“Thanks for your service” I cried to RCA’s blank eye.

The attendant looked at me quizzically for 
the longest time. Finally, he said, “No problem.”





America Machine


I sip coffee, fending off chill at the annual Dairy
Cow Days Parade in a northern Wisconsin town.
Jackets and coats line the route, testament to 
the Midwest in June. Last snow of spring, a few flakes,
fell eleven days ago. The couple next to me say 
frost greeted their emerging plants with a cold shoulder,
putting them in retreat. They talk of job, family, car 
repairs, the ginseng crop they expect. True locals,
born here, loyal to the little town’s boundaries, 
an island in the American archipelago, bounded by 
shores of crops, thin on latitude and longitude.

The couple point to what rounds the corner. 
A man I guess to be Dad pulls a small red play 
wagon. It carries his son, about five, who sits in a
red, white, and blue cardboard box, “The America 
Machine.” He is hunched over against the cold in a 
windbreaker. He holds an American flag. 

My couple smiles. Hands fly up like ground doves.
“That’s our grandson!” The Dad flashes a gloved hand
of reply and pulls on. His weary smile fades with the 
receding brass notes of the band just passed. The boy
stays hunkered. He does not wave his flag.