Cranes

To again be the muddy people with scabbed-over slashes on our shins, hours spent lurking in alders or stunted river willows, beaver-chewed trees like punji stakes guarding the banks from us, muddy people who hunch over nests, the cranes’ demonstrative flapping and screeching, as if birds knew losing children hurts, could evoke ruin, call forth worst pain: ripped fingernail, salt spread on canker sores, serrated blade slowly slicing nostril or tongue. Our neighbor’s daughter jumped into the river, and the river took her, limbs so numb that a last thrash barely rippled. They pulled her from the intake sluice above the dam, pale and pressed indignantly against metal grates with floating debris, soda bottles, sticks, and trash. She was fourteen. Oh for the bliss of animal ignorance or at least the exhausted labors of our past, broke-neck birds and eggs we the muddy people gathered, cracked, and slurped, roots, berries, the raw fish fed to muddy mouths, muddy bellies, muddy urge to lie down with each other before exhaustion sent us to sleep, one last gasp to make more against the world’s devouring. Cranes quieted to fear, to hunger, to hunt, became the slow, deliberate pacing of a predator through shallows, lever-like head tilting back and skewering a fish or leech that’s swallowed with weed and mud and no memory of shells, shrieks against a particular nest: who wouldn’t ask for this dumb gift not to recall the angle of a head ready to ask a question, curl of hair, sad pout across the dinner table, as if wishing, as if speaking, as if we can do anything but wail against the very air we breathe, the horror that we share the hungers and know nothing of the river’s indifference, steadily moving water the worst metaphor, these thoughts that are not chosen, do not move endlessly onward, but turn and swirl, eddy and turn, swirl and eddy once again, torturous pools of what if, if only, and why oh why?