On the Occasion of an Argument beside the River Where I Live

Someone says we are trapped in language, and so the sun drops overhead

     through stilly pines where the river explains nothing and far away now

     several men and women on the Yangtze look up from their nets and

     point to the sky.

Bright Chinese fish, like all my words struggle in the nets of a stranger.

But because there is no surprise nor delight in the hour of owl-call and

     locusts vibrating in the walnut trees, my friend despairs. All she hears

     are owls and locusts and though two grandfathers molder in the silk of

     their caskets and she loved them, the night is just the night.

And two men flying overhead from opposite directions embrace and hover

     over the house, kicking their long spindly legs. Foolishness, I hear one

say, foolishness.

Tonight the chatter of things is enormous and also the silence that allows

     such chatter—the empty space the tongue clicks through to make a

     word, the cataract between atoms a light thing might leap.

So, if there is nothing here, then the absence of the river makes the river

possible.

And the slow stripping of all my clothes makes the heat of this July night

     a bearable delight and a secret joy, walking down the driveway, to the

     bank of the river, over the water-worked stones, and into the current.

Laura, I don't know what you are doing but I am swimming naked in the

Shenandoah and the sun is in China, still rising over the Yangtze.

And there is nothing for you here if two men can't fly skimming the

     surface of the water eating horseflies and laughing; and it is the truth,

     not my truth or some private certainty I tell you.

It is midnight and I sparkle like a trout.