It shines on the river like a bruise on a
thigh.
The light trips over the water
and falls into the coffee table head first.
The river, for its part, does nothing but sit
there and take it all in. The light, the warm humid
air sucking at it like a sucker. The dead
spaces where no wind moves over it like
a hand. I want to imagine it calling to the moon,
something relating to gravity or attraction, but
that’s not where this is going. The river is
(at least I imagine) heading where it always heads,
that is, the ocean, which really is pulled
heavily toward the moon all the time, thus tides.
But you know that, don’t you? You, O reader, I’m
calling you out. What do you know about the moon?
What do you know about the Mississippi, which in my
head is always preceded with mighty, which
flows from (what I imagine is) a trickle, scars down
the middle of the continent, builds, crescendoes,
exits through the marshy lowlands south of here,
into the gulf? Where does it go after that,
the water from all of America? I’m asking you.
Do you have any idea where the moon pulls it next?
The light trips over the water
and falls into the coffee table head first.
The river, for its part, does nothing but sit
there and take it all in. The light, the warm humid
air sucking at it like a sucker. The dead
spaces where no wind moves over it like
a hand. I want to imagine it calling to the moon,
something relating to gravity or attraction, but
that’s not where this is going. The river is
(at least I imagine) heading where it always heads,
that is, the ocean, which really is pulled
heavily toward the moon all the time, thus tides.
But you know that, don’t you? You, O reader, I’m
calling you out. What do you know about the moon?
What do you know about the Mississippi, which in my
head is always preceded with mighty, which
flows from (what I imagine is) a trickle, scars down
the middle of the continent, builds, crescendoes,
exits through the marshy lowlands south of here,
into the gulf? Where does it go after that,
the water from all of America? I’m asking you.
Do you have any idea where the moon pulls it next?