Table of Contents

Robert Vivian

Looking into Wolf Creek

Inside this wisp of slow-moving water
another heart beats more deeply than my own,
sounding the plumb bob center of every living thing
that ever was or will be.
I came down to its banks through long rusty grass
to find something, but what it is
only the falling stars can say.
“Put some grass down in the creel,”
my dead grandfather told me once in a dream,
but he didn’t say why.
He was standing in another creek eighty years ago
with his rod tip held out above the water,
and paradise was all around him in sunlight
spoking through the trees and ripples so soft
across the surface of the creek they must have been
whispering something about forever.
I tried to talk to him but I couldn’t get the words out,
so now I say things I wish I could tell him,
how a place like Wolf Creek is beyond all thirst
and knowing or the power to name, how just standing
on its banks is like a secret promise that’s already been
fulfilled before a cold wind rears up like a horse
and kicks my breath away.

River Stone

I went to the river to find a stone,
something I could hold in my hand and believe in.
The whole earth listened as I walked through the woods,
every step a short lifetime between starlight and darkness
and someone’s quiet voice talking about surrender
in whispers I could barely hear.
I hoped the stone would heal me of my grief and sickness,
its smooth roundness taking me back to the river
whenever I touched it, guiding me past
this heart’s profusions and the certainty of waste.
As I walked I knew I would never do a more honest thing,
that the stone would welcome me when I found it
as one who was coming home after a difficult journey
across dry lands with tide pools made of dust.
Along the way I could almost hear my dead grandfather
breathing as he listened to my footfalls,
the bare, rattled wheezing of his smoker’s
throat as he slowly turned into smoke.
He knew why it was important to go to a river
to find a stone, why it had nothing to do
with before or after or names written in a book,
just a frayed thread of yearning born of broken origins
so that when I found the stone I could return
to what was left of my life, knowing it still had room
for a few precious flowers.

Robert Vivian's most recent book is a novel entitled Water And Abandon, just published this fall. He teaches at Alma College and in the low-residency MFA program at the Vermont College Of Fine Arts. 

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