PrintPoem – Ever River (By David Russell)
Ever River
Prime time, swallowed whole
Could the universe, just once
Have poured itself into a molecule
So that, thereafter,
Nothing could flow?
Never to suckle a broken circuit
For sparking life;
Never split by caesarean pangs
Of primal punctures.
Black hole never thinned to liquid
Boiling mud foundation pustules
Turning all to gas.
All words now must use the
Speech synthesizer of the global dish
So whence the river?
Its source in rejection
Generating dragging threads –
Bubbling, puddling, squelching,
Steaming, clouding, drizzling
Splashing process
Where would we be if nothing flowed?
Or would the truth be bared
If water found its ends without the flowing means
* * *
Round every dam,
Above all inundations, beyond all droughts
The river bubbles
blobs it ever on
Bleeding out the parched bed’s cracks
One river is in every river
Every river recycles to one river
Let all be laminated, superimposed
Rising through fired mud beds
Their crystal sheen, chemical, pure
Rippling underground, mountain rill
Forked, widened through basin faults
Embracing all the swellings,
Feeding the clouds to give all back
Siphoned off to feed past plains
For grains and pulses
Stock, rodent, and their plague-guests.
So that the sea, long past greedy
Would not devour it all,
Sucked off for dams and factories
Vast barriers, shields
for ravaging and wars
Pockets through the centuries
To save and drown –
Only at rare junctures diverted.
Once laden, this river dragged its sludge
Throttled by pustule settlements
Banked by insect-egg bin-liners
Scummed, frothed and sediment-clouded:
The acrid stout of a fumbling home-brewer
Now cleansed, through dereliction
Readmitting life
A happy adjunct to proclaim
The true mess swept from sight
Once, far beyond erectus, sapiens, Neanderthal
It fed, embraced stampedes
Massed reptilian, bird and mammal flesh
In swallowing, fossil-printing beds
Suffused meanwhile with blood and effluent
Then, in our species time
It flanked massacres,
Punctuation marks for ruthless millennia
Straddled by canoes, submersibles
Some bodies floated, bloated to clog downstream
Some helmets loosened
Inverted to build meaningless boats
Sometimes it flanked great ceremonies,
Phased into festivals
Got scummed with battered lager cans
And sodden wrappers
Much-brown and creamed with tack
Peppered from abandoned ashtrays
The dredgers came and went
And present-focused
The contorted loop
Full circle of prehistory
From monocellular poison
To strained reaches of torture growth
Perverted contents, twisted molecules
* * *
On revisitation
With masses under the bridge
Generic memories shrunk and muted
I stand in a clear stretch
Where there is no bridge in sight
Such myriads transitory
One-directional;
Some can reverse into the human memory
Old palaces, monuments
Crumble into their own façades
Mirrored by brash renovation
The cycles emulate
And modulate the tides
Clean, dirty, overpopulated, vacant
Squeaky splendor, son et lumière
Beams us back to what we thought things were
Before the truth unbunged the drain
Emitting odour of perspective,
Its trickling blended with the general stream.
Author Bio:
David Russell was born in 1940. Resident in the UK. Writer of poetry, literary criticism, speculative fiction and romance. Main poetry collection Prickling Counterpoints (1998); poems published in online International Times. Main speculative works High Wired On (2002); Rock Bottom (2005). Translation of Spanish epic La Araucana, Amazon 2013. Romances: Self’s Blossom; Explorations; Further Explorations; Therapy Rapture; Darlene, An Ecstatic Rendezvous (all pub Extasy (Devine Destinies). Singer-songwriter/guitarist. Main CD albums Bacteria Shrapnel and Kaleidoscope Concentrate. Many tracks on You Tube.
This poem is part of the complete collection; Speculum: Collected Poetry and Prose, by David Russell.
View or Download the complete collection here in PDF format.
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