A River as We Had Been Told
Rent from DeepDyve- A River as We Had Been Told
No boat docked nearby. No boatman alongside the paint-chipped stern waiting to ferry her across.
Not a paddle. Not a single oar. Not one life preserver the color of gaudy flames.
We were not surprised: time was not a river anymore, not a river as we had been told, as we’d been led to believe all these years.
Neither buoyed, nor streaming, neither floating nor flowing away. No grace, not God’s, nor anyone’s. (Her oncologist neglected to prescribe enough morphine.)
If there was a living and benevolent water, it was not anywhere near to her. Only blanched sand and a filament of self—
translucent anchor sinking from the visible world. [End Page 53]
There was a sign that final week—thirst, inexorable thirst, a ravenous thirst, heartless in its magnitude.
Her jaw like a rusted gate, its hinges hardly creaking open.
The water glass, the tablespoon, the plastic cup, the gulping and the gulping again.
Drink . . . Good . . . Takea sip . . . One more . . . Good . . .good—
that’s it. [End Page 54]
Peter Marcus is the author of one book of poetry, Dark Square. His poems have appeared in the Antioch Review, Boulevard, Ploughshares, and the Southern Review, among others, and his work is upcoming in Broken Atoms in Our Hands, an anthology on nuclear war and disaster (Shabda Press) and other journals. He’s been a recipient of a Connecticut Fellowship for the Arts Grant and residency fellowships at Vermont Studio Center, Marble House Project, Norton Island, and Playa.
