From the recording Riversdale
A psychologically charged poem in which a childhood river becomes a threshold between existence and disappearance. As landscape, fear and imagination begin to merge, the struggle to survive becomes something deeper — an encounter with the fragile idea of self, and with the mysterious possibility that something beyond us may still be listening.
Lyrics
THE RIVER THAT KEPT MY NAME
A fallen tree—
not a bridge,
but the river’s guess
at what a crossing might be.
Trevor
spidered
(frightened, though he hid it
in the careful arrangement
of his hands)
across the bark’s cold spine.
Below us
the river thinking
in its root-dark vowels.
And somewhere in my head
a tightrope at The Moscow State Circus,
the applause a distant machine,
the water beneath
blinking
its slow, green eye.
We ran.
Past the bull skull
(hollow as a warning),
over the stone wall
rimmed with little devils of glass,
into bulrushes soft as sugar,
their sweetness a lie
hiding its barbs.
The factory pond held its own sky.
The red floats bobbled,
skated the skin
of that held breath—
a single pike burning under it
like a lantern someone forgot to dim.
Then the orange evening
tightened its fist around the day.
Home.
Or the attempt at home.
Down the bank I slithered—
d
o
w
n—
into the river’s hunger,
into mud that froze me to myself.
Trevor’s laugh broke open,
a cracking shell around fear.
My life:
a reel buckling
frame, shearing thin,
each one a door
half-closing.
I prayed—
for rescue,
for anything the river had not decided
to keep.
And the river,
patient,
closed over my name
as if rehearsing the act
of keeping it.
Then the other tree—
not the first one,
but its quiet brother—
d
r
o
o
p
e
d
its veins into the river,
listening,
the way witnesses listen
when a child-version of us
is still kicking in the dark,
still insisting
on the thin bright door
of light.