Rivers

from Allen Ginsberg’s “Sunflower Sutra,” Howl and Other Poems:

The oily water on the river mirrored the red sky, sun
      sank on top of final Frisco peaks, no fish in that
      stream, no hermit in those mounts, just our-
      selves rheumy-eyed and hungover like old bums
      on the riverbank, tired and wily.
Look at the Sunflower, he said, there was a dead gray
      shadow against the sky, big as a man, sitting
      dry on top of a pile of ancient sawdust–
–I rushed up enchanted–it was my first sunflower,
      memories of Blake–my visions–Harlem
and Hells of the Eastern rivers, bridges clanking Joes
      Greasy Sandwiches, dead baby carriages, black
      treadless tires forgotten and unretreaded, the
      poem of the riverbank, condoms & pots, steel
      knives, nothing stainless, only the dank muck
      and the razor-sharp artifacts passing into the
      past–
and the gray Sunflower poised against the sunset,
      crackly bleak and dusty with the smut and smog
      and smoke of olden locomotives in its eye–

from Wendell Berry’s “The Heron,” Farming: A Handbook

While the summer’s growth kept me
anxious in planted rows, I forgot the river
where it flowed, faithful to its way,
beneath the slope where my household
has taken its laborious stand.
I could not reach it even in dreams.
But one morning at the summer’s end
I remember it again, as though its being
lifts into mind in undeniable flood,
and I carry my boat down through the fog,
over the rocks, and set out.
I go easy and silent, and the warblers
appear among the leaves of the willows,
their flight like gold thread
quick in the live tapestry of the leaves.
And I go on until I see crouched
on a dead branch sticking out of the water
a heron—so still that I believe
he is a bit of drift hung dead above the water.

from Jim Wayne Miller’s “The Faith of Fishermen,” Brier, His Book:

We need to know wonders are still alive at the base
of the steel and concrete world we’ve made—a
yellow-eyed whiskered wildness, something old and
other, akin to what we feel, powerful, cold, living in
the dark around the gates that regulate the rivers
of our lives.

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