Midstream

In the past ten days, two friends have died. Not unexpectedly, no shocks. A couple of weeks ago, when they were both still alive, everyone and everything around me seemed painfully mortal, and this poem is what I wrote then.

I cross the bridge, but
Midstream, I stop.
So much water, passing under.
I cannot hold it back.

Midstream – upstream – a dipper,
Mischievous, concealed among stones and ripples,
Bobs, and waits.
Midstream – downstream – a fisherman
Casts and retrieves, over and over,
Silent, focused, amid swirling water.

I, too, have cast,
Over and over.
But now my line diffuses and is lost in movement
And what, now, is left to retrieve?

By this great river I sit
Beneath the fiddle-tree,
A gnarled and feathered oak, gashed
By storm, decay and distant ghosts of song.
Riverbank trees, like frozen statues, arch and crane,
Their token reflections broken
Like dreams in the midstream of sleep.

On dark ripples, tiny sounds of water on water,
Midstream, the undercurrent
Chases the rain from highland to lowland
Into deeper water yet.

Midstream, unseen fish bestir
And battle homeward. But I
Am snagged, log-jammed, midstream
Watching lives flow on and vanish into river,
Slippery, elusive as salmon, impossible to hold,
Passing, on unfathomed journeys, beyond my sight

While I stand helpless and wait
Midstream.