Bruce Robinson
Dream of a Different River

Homes, David, may be where the hearth is, but

crossing Susquehanna was too much

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for either of us; we should have sought

recumbent fords where the water

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felt too deep, a swollen bridge

too slack to skirt past an eddy, we should

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have crossed by night only, by the seams

of the frosted moss, by the folding eddies

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of that flow blue white in its melting light

forgetting we could have bathed - could we have? -

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was it here? - fathoming only depth.

David, listen: what’s a river but

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covert flow? Or hidden purport, current’s dither,

canny depth repelling all that’s light?

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Or is it because what we think we know

we’ve simply grown to expect

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that we see barely the suspension

of a surface: like a hyperbolic

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lens, like a home we needn’t get to,

at least not too soon. We should

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have thought of this, I think: not now,

nor ever, will we catch that light below.

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