Suze Kay
Here is how it started: the river meandered
from the crow’s path and folded into silt.
Little ribbon river full of fish, sunaddled
swimming in a wet bed. Here, said the first man.
He stopped his wagons and pulled heavy pins
from the yokes of his oxen. They set themselves
lowing to the sedges. They died as all things do
with little fuss at the end, and he fed their bones
back to the soil. Good oxen. Good river. Good man.
One man can live as of the land. He can read
seasons in pinecones and feel rain coming
in his trick hip from plains away. It is only right
for a river to flow wherever it wants, but a man
will also want. So will his neighbor, scowling where
their wants meet. And a child will want more than
his brother, and they will want more than their father,
and together they will break the land apart in parcels.
The buffalo who would not be yoked were killed
and their bones were piled high to bleach white
under the sun. Wheat was grown until the soil
was dust and the wind pushed all the good men gone
and the river pulled its flowing pin from its own yoke
as silt piled in high hems and all the fish choked.
Goodbye river. Goodbye fish. Goodbye men, for now,
for all things flow forward and all things come back
along the oxbow, where I say here and sit on moss.
A good day’s hike from the corn and its trundling
plowing beasts, I wade barefoot across the river
to a drop of land to find stones in lines, a crumbled
hearth. In the end: the slim, still lake bent before me
will fill and ferment with death. It too will die
as all things do and be reborn a bog. I want
to pull time from my neck like a sweater and sink
into peat that isn’t ready yet. I want my bones
to lie swaddled in the oxbow, kept whole forever.
Suze Kay is a pastry chef in New Jersey. Her poetry is published in HAD, The Hooghly Review, Acropolis Journal, and more. She’s happy you found her here, and hopes you’ll keep up with her on Twitter @suz_chef.
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