THE FLOW
1992
There are days he has no stomach for it: a dry wind from Sarajevo, odors of torched hospitals, niter that pungency of vowels wafting across the river. His time nothing but these furrows. The caved-in cistern, the collapse of light, the lifted stones that were once a home. It can't be stopped. Islands scattered along its length, between its banks, added to by its motion. Somewhere cottonwoods blow tufted seeds toward the mainland, ospreys nest in a tangle of uprooted trees. Down there, where the field ends, an embankment, a flood carrying silt up over the verge, bringing richness from the depth.
He thinks a lack of hardness in the ivy listening up a wall. Peepers singing in wet woods.