Undone

bow,
aground

Undone:

Eyelet, Throat Line, Toe, and Tongue

how can water die

with drama, in a final cascade,

a suicide, a victim of terrain, a martyr?

                                                At Stilli’s Mouth

                                                Richard Hugo

We watched your life slide by

like it was a quiet winter

river of ice, like there was time still

to make it through the cooling months you set

yourself down for.  But not used

to rivers I couldn’t know where

I walked back to, or where the mouth

caught all the salt and silt of you it could

and everything else the tide might desire.

You’d taken enough to get you

through, I'll grant you that.  I watched you pack

the only bag you had and stand

with your back to all of us, good

riddance written on the bottom

of your feet.  Seeing you

walk off like that at the start

of autumn, to ‘broker

with your soul’ you’d said, made me

come to feel a building, bulging heat beneath

my fingers, as if I’d shut them

in a car door and never cried out. 

And I didn’t know what you meant

then, I thought you’d walk

until you got half tired and then

by some pluck of love turn

round and be our mother

again.  But there’s some

hunger under the river you bank

on and when the tide rises up 

to your good riddance shoes,

whose soles are worn and rubbed

up with running, whose tongue

laughs under the knot-near-the-key

hole, whose strings sit mute by virtue

of what they try to close.  They are the first

thing I find  you’ve abandoned

when I come looking for you, when I

finally knew we weren’t enough to make you

want to live.  Listen, I followed

almost right away.  I walked

where you walked, I ducked under all that 

thick-limbed reclaimed pasture, all those trees

startled birds and the chittering

vermin, they were as close as I could get

to saving your life.  I’d find you

the following spring, feet bare

and not very far from where I started

looking, the river receded by then,

or at least on the bank of that

particular jut, the rim of the rocks

all salt, all crystal, like agate, like bitumen,

like hunger on the mouth of one who constantly licks

when it thirsts for something.  But nothing,

not river, not children, your own even,

can feed it.