Reaching Forever. Philip C. Kolin

my currents and give the stars a place to sparkle.

      I am wiser than the callow land that seeps through me in its race to the Gulf of Tears where the souls of sinners go.

      Fickle winds may scribble cuneiforms on me, genealogies of suicides and skeptics. But I outlast these winds, truants to tranquility, loose tongues tattling variegated tales.

      My children, who preserve the world before time was counted, have now been parceled into seasons. Gar, gators, turtles, cottonmouths, bullheads, raptors, cormorants, and sliders.

      I paint rippling murals on shorelines, swamps and lowlands, backwaters, oxbow lakes, coves, and eyebrow-shaped islands. My colors crawl, swim, and fly.

      Brackish muskrats and wide-toothed otters; mussels and mud-speckled trout; snowy egrets, little blue herons, red-tailed hawks—all know my voice, and I theirs.

      When the world ends, I will still hover over the Deep.

      The Fugitive River

      It goes where it has to. No shores

      shackle it. This river keeps its beginnings secret

      and its ends. Like the moon it may be full

      and silvery with fish, or a slivered crescent

      following a fleeting raft. But always