What water means

Through a narrowing, fir stubbled Montana valley,

between highway and abandoned railway line,

flowed the young Missouri, three times dammed

already and steady in its flow. There I stood

each dusk for a week, water to the waist, bare legs,

bare feet, and fished for silver trout. I was not

alone; drift boats passed downriver now and then

like ice floes pulling polar bears further out to sea,

while ospreys circled, dived, then came to rest

on platforms built to breed their nests.

But all apart, housed only by his own robust endeavour,

one resident lingered from another age of industry.

Three times, maybe four, a beaver, retired river master

flapped his fat and shotgun tail at me. The first time

its warning crack slapped flat on the Missouri’s skin

I spun round to see who was hunting so near the shore.

The next evening I had the luck to see him first,

paddling across to the current’s strength then down towards me

until, level with my chest, his eyes caught mine and bang!

This, he said, was his territory and had been so long

before me. To hear him say it, to hold me

as a threat like coyote or wolf: unfastening

delight, as suddenly exciting as the quick shadowy pull of a fish.

For surely this is one of mankind’s urgent, taut desires,

to play some timeless, wild, recurring thing, unstrung

from the ever onward chug to settle life more comfortably

and, like wildflowers left to bloom by railroad tracks,

neither creator, nor destroyer; just for one night’s span to be.

But there’s another elevation here, more revealing perhaps

of these past lines’ own careful bridge: that to be stood

in the Missouri’s wash is to be hid not from mankind’s march,

but from that other tug, which like the pull of a trout’s

home stream, would have me by the balls and bounden.

It is so wonderful to be here without sex. If you, rodent,

could understand my bleating tongue, I’d let you know how

differently we came to this purging waterway, you to build and

build again, and I to run from any building I might do,

to be like a wasted thing in this Montana valley,

as if my every seed, like the cleared debris of beaver dams,

could be sectioned from me, and left in time to run its way

to slick the warmth of a southern sea.