The Heart has Many Rivers
A Texas Prelude
In the deep cool waters
formed by the taming of the Trinity River,
a tumultuous body
that now nestles up against
the towering concrete face of a dam,
there swims a striped bass.
He darts, hydrodynamic,
sliding through shadows, metallic and swift,
chasing down silverside or smelt.
His shadow passes over a tiny creature lying on the riverbed,
gray, unremarkable, easily mistaken for a small stone,
but waiting; focused on ancient patterns of light.
Slipping through currents,
the bass gives off a particular scent,
an olfactory signature left in its wake,
drifting back along
the sinuous paths and patterns
marking the passage of the fish.
With the expertise of ancestors, the small body bursts
towards the undulating passage of a particular shadow
picked out among many, following pheromones on a trajectory towards the bass.
Expended, it crosses the path of the bass,
with any luck getting sucked into the body of the fish and lodging in its gills.
Exhausted it rolls into a ball and waits.
This ribbon of a river; Cahaba. Early Summer. Standing
I watch the water slide over a series of limestone shelfs
Harboring Water Willow and stands of Cahaba lilies.
The lilies, bursts of white against the dark depths of the water.
Starbursts that open at dusk to lure the Plebeian Sphinx Moth
And last but a single night and day.
The sunlight rolls in ripples along the rapid moving surface;
Below the aerodynamic forms of unknown fish dart by,
And then an ancient shadow.
An elongated side, shimmering gray and dappled.
Dark spines in a ridge tapered to a whip of a tail.
Armor plated.
Gar?
Frozen in Permian time 215 million years unchanged,
As evidenced by the fossil record.
I am distracted by a small throng of people in shorts and bright shirts with water shoes and walking sticks. One elderly couple have waded out waist deep and are stuck, stymied by a swift channel flowing between two shallower shoals. The man’s straw hat has blown off of his head, the cord pulled tight against his throat by the wind, with his hair whipping back like a flag. They’ve come for the lilies, named for the river, but more generally known as Shoal lilies.
A hundred years ago they were beautiful ubiquity, but now they are rare. There are only 50 extant populations left, all in the states of South Carolina, Georgia, and Alabama. The three largest remaining stands are located in the Catawba River in South Carolina, the Flint River in Georgia, and of course the Cahaba, here in Alabama.
She wades through a swift channel concentrating on the placement of each step,
The tension in her body; her face hidden in the shadow of her Panama palm hat.
The lilies are new to her, though of course she’s been meaning to come for years.
She wonders why now, this particular pilgrimage?
She is charmed by the peculiar dainty beauty of the tiny white Water Willow,
But of course, the lilies are transcendent.
She hasn’t thought of her calamity for long moments strung into a morning of peace.
This place of lilies; perhaps Muir had it right, who needs cathedrals indeed,
When we proceed to dwell on and in such places.
How did we ever understand them as ordinary?
Of course, it was our attention that was ordinary,
They have always been spectacular.
How could she think of her wreck of a home/life, when there were lilies?
The sublimity of their white;
Ablaze across her field of vision.
She closed her eyes and leaned into the wind;
The afterimage of the lilies stood out as black bursts
Against the white expanse that she thought of as her mind,
A black star-spangled field.
She took pause at the inversion, a sublimity of black.
Was this all it took for her to take her life back?
“How have I ever thought of it as ordinary?”, she wondered.
Of course, he was killin’ himself. Slow, like most of us. I was through talking about it. He would either climb outta the hole he was steady diggin’ or he would eventually bury himself. If I am honest, I’m bettin’ on a funeral soon. I wonder who she would be, free of a life imagined with the man. I am standing on the sandy bank trading stories with a fisherman.
“ I ‘ve been fishing this river for thirty years. I always tell people the secret is live bait. These fish ain’t fallin’ for a fake lure. Last Saturday, standing right here I caught a stringer full and on the last cast I hooked a spotted gar. I thought of clubbing it and throwing it up on shore for the birds like I watched my Father when fishin’ in my youth. You’ve never seen such an ugly fish, but it was spectacular. It took me 20 minutes to reel it up, but I cut line when I saw it was a gar. I’m tellin’ you it was beautiful.”
Listening to fish stories, I watched her navigate the current,
Stopping to photograph the lilies. She would photograph one stand,
Then her attention was drawn to another.
She waded out further,
Lured down the river from flower to flower
Until I wasn’t sure I could see her any longer.
For the longest time
I was tracking her red shirt,
Now I wasn’t sure she’d been wearing red.
The Greeks began a rumination; a river of thought, if you will, on the nature of a thing.
Maybe imagined as a river, maybe the ship of a man.
As this river rushes by, pulled by gravity to the sea, how is it always and never the same?
With every step, changed, unchanged, but still Cahaba.
Today the river; tomorrow the sea, but still imagined in essence the same.
Isn’t the essence the thing?
What is her essence, I wonder.
And will it pull her under?
Perhaps her heart asunder.
What is her essence, I wonder.
That thing that pulls her on.
That thing she navigates.
What is her essence, I wonder.
That thing for which she wanders.
That thing for which she waits.