On a cold Olympian mount
Flushed down the source
Of late-century fumblings
Like all sky gods eager to craft
Their own signature on the earth's face
Flowing as a tepid glacier
Trapped in jagged blasted valleys
Or sifted as a desert marsh
Wetted to operatic squalls
Occasionally, bearing on a grand
Cosmic alliance, as easy to grasp
As a star, heaven hidden in the depths
Polluted seasons buffering against
Meanders that touched other states
No receded bars fertile with memory
Currents too dead to swim up, no slippery
Foals shedding their richness
Barely a ripple, a dull sheen hushed
To roil out unfamiliar shapes, unbecoming patterns
In the valley of melancholic sires
My river ran short and still
Away from the tortured falls
And straining locks of past weldings
Upstream, blacker mountains
Darker ice, shattering in the roaring wind
One time, the plates disgorged
A sudden cliff and I fell
Plunging an ocean of limitless space
Tasting like the firmament's first cold
Gargled and spat back along
The Trent Aegir, go pitiful stateless slew
Go unsevered resaca, crystalline channel
Free of the fetters of undredged trials
The great bores of the Continuous Ocean
Will spare no undiluted alkaline approach
Like yours, you will have no masterly delta
Or singing swell to challenge the rest
Because what is a river that forges not
Life nor death? To join the nation of streams
Takes patience, perhaps a little knowledge
When to stand against the tide
And how to fashion a caisson in a storm
I was castaway on the shores
Of my house's name.
@nepion_boreas17
