LOVE A RIVER


I slept beneath a naked willow thicket
in a thin sleeping bag with a thousand
cranes, cronking away the cold night
on a shallow strand of the braided Platte.

After the crazy staging of a hundred thousand,
their collective voice a feral roar up and down
the river, I could now hear each one,
recognizable and individual

as they stirred from crane dreams,
their feet fast in the shifting sand.
I thought of love as a river, this river,
wild and throwing itself off mountains,

growing wide and deep, spreading
out across the plains, splitting
and separating in loose ropes
of water and willow and sand

coming together and apart, each channel
of the river different and changing,
but the water still the same water,
from source to mouth, from birth to death,

from love to love to love to love.






© 2007 by Richard W. Todd

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