Broad as a meadow and looking quite solid
the river ran slowly
smooth and brown like a long sunning snake
across his late childhood.
He used to take tourists around its reaches
and show them the moving
rootless islands, rafts of beauty which seen
from boats would sink
then surface again like overblown whales.
Insidious underflow,
deadly for swimmers yet some fools for a
dare had jumped over,
the river though knew and merciless it had
choked one or two.
Wild but beautiful those patches of golden
quicksand glistened with
hidden eddies in which no one was safe as
straggling roots caught
paddling toes in floating green and clawed
as river cascaded into
cauldron of boiling waters below, old now
he shuddered at all the
dead memories that devilish water held as
it and he dawdled there.
