Monday, January 26, 2015

Downstream Pt. 2

She would go down to the river while it was still dark, and know by the call of the thrushes when it was light enough (opening her eyes,having been at the memory of some wine, like Burgundy but with another name in a village,and how she had felt to find they were alike, and parentless, and how he had looked away as though embarrassed when she said sexual, about her first feelings)---light enough to see the path through the trees. But she went when she went always before dawn, before she could see.

One morning in the gray light, it's sound as first submerged in the river's movements, a dory came. A man in a hat rowing. Moving downriver, as foreign as anything she could imagine. Another stood in the bow. He wore another hat and was dressed in neat khaki clothing. She saw the gentle whip of his fly rod pointing into the slack water behind large rocks, after rainbow trout. He looked--exactly the word she was after--silly. But he whipped the rod to set the fly here and there, time and again, the other man rowing, now the rattle of an oarlock, the boat moving toward her, the excessive neatness of their clothing, the creases, the grim expression clear on their red, razor-stropped faces, rowing hard.

She froze with the weight of lead in her belly, coming that fast across the water toward her---never saw her, whipping the shallows for the waiting trout, thirty feet away. Silly. Her face quivered. Silly. She put her hands, her palms cold from the rock, against her face. What this meant, the fear, or qualms about  being seen by men, she put off examining.

Winter and summer she would come down to be in the rocks by the water, lying in the dark, waiting for the light, as though by the act itself she could overcome her losses. She meant to remember to tell someone--how the colors came out each morning, show she would like a dress where the wind blew each layer open, somehow.

3 comments:

  1. It's a beautiful and very zen like image you've drawn here. Loss, hope, and mystery all wrapped in your wonderful prose form.

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  2. Love it. I may not understand it but I still love it.

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  3. I like your writing. It reminds me of Kent Haruf...have you read him at all? My favorite book is "Plainsong". It is nice to have you back.

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