Oh I Wish I Had a Story I Could Skate Away On

River ice.

I really don’t think that one word can make a poem. But two!

Every word we hold within our mind is like a vessel filled with passengers. Each one has a story that it wants to tell. If not a ship of fools, it’s most certainly a boatload of motley characters.

River. Where can one begin to list associations this one joins inside my personal community of memories and education? Begin with Huckleberry Finn rafting down the muddy Mississippi with Jim before his reckoning to light out for the territories, and open up on an infant Moses found within a basket upon the banks of the River Nile and still I’ve only just begun. What about that January morning more than thirteen years ago while riding along the Merrimack and thinking to myself my marriage growing cold and lifeless was a little like that self same river, frozen.

Ice.

~Son Rivers 2007