San Diego River

A MYSTERY

This afternoon I found a poem In an old notebook… one I wrote in January, 1991. That’s the date I jotted after the last line; so it must have been then that I wrote it.  For the life of me I can’t remember what was bugging me, what was on my mind in January of that year. George Bush’s Iraq War, which would...how can anybody forget... eventually last for 8 years, 8 months, 3 weeks and 4 days with 4486 Americans dead to say nothing of 188,000 Iraqis dead... didn’t begin until March, 2003; and it would be twenty years before I’d meet my great friend Amir Jirjis, whose Family’s home when he was a boy was on the Tigris River in  Baghdad.

Maybe I was remembering the Feather River in Northern California where I sat and watched the current when I was a boy.  Could I have been thinking about that afternoon in 1970 on the road to Vung Tau watching American planes strafing the Saigon river to destroy what..? killing what? I’ve often wondered… Perhaps I was trying to figure out why the San Diego River, which I could see from the back porch of the house where we lived in 1991, was considered a river at all… why it wasn’t called San Diego Creek or Mission Valley Branch or maybe a run.  As the kids say when there’s something they don’t care much about anyway and don’t understand… “Whatever.”

RIVER RUN

The Tigris and the Euphrates

never existed at all even for a minute

that anybody can prove for sure

and you can just put away the photograph

the one of you by the bridge in Istanbul

or was it Constantinople

see what I mean

even cities aren’t definite

anyway

it looks like you

by the bridge with the pale skiff

stuck there in the middle of the Bosporus

in spite of its heeling in invisible wind

we all know

a stream itself

is never the same

from one minute to the next

roll Sacramento roll

and whoever figured out the mystery

the one about snowflakes not being alike

thought he’d stumbled onto something

but that isn’t anything compared to a river

those things are just outrageous

when you think about it

refusing to be pinned down

wide sometimes a mere trickle

long or short like the Singapore

would you believe the river is half a mile long

no gravel or great rocks

roll on Yangtze

faint fragile finally full

clear as an August sky

in deep canyons it goes

and through broad plains

roll roll Colorado

icy film covered with frost

warm bringer of life

destroyer 

sweet putrid murky

slow

betrayer

running smooth

rough in the storm

forbidding inviting

the highway to where we ought to go

River Jordan roll on

rains come

the pace quickens 

trickle to rapids to flood

roll on Missouri

red clay cliffs

hawks circle and ibis strut

Zambezi roll on

dead men bloat in lukewarm water

roll Saigon roll

warehouses and docks

roll Swanee 

catfish surface and dive

funeral pyres drift smoldering

Ganges roll on

icebergs stay in the ocean

thank god

roll on Dneiper

       --January, 1991

Feather River near Yuba City