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
