Beyond Roads’ Withering

 ~ based on the piece Old and Lost Rivers, by composer Tobias Picker

I'd rather not write about those everyday things
of the South down here. There's something else
that has taken hold of me, as if recall or imagining.
It's about old and lost rivers, of antediluvian character.
I might have seen them, or this might be a dim vision.
Other things gather around my thoughts of slow waters.
Maybe old sunlight echoing from a long path of lilies,
begonias, and soft camellias glowing under a vast halo.

It's best to wander down your mind and on into Louisiana.

A weary river is shrunken by years and idles past old Hope Manor.
Loons stand in shallows, and from depths a fish wrinkles the surface.
Warmth in air has come from under slow clouds' summer momentum.
The season has settled here halfway between dogwoods and autumn.

Beyond roads' withering come the faint trails
of vagrant, leaning grasses. Odd shadows delve
under trees toward lost rivers' moss-hued reveries.
Dragonflies weave their complex fabric of ennui
out of silences hung in time. Beyond roads' fading,
lost rivers are hidden, flowing with ambivalence,
odors, and goggling eyes below cypress water roots.

There is no one there to know a lost river.
It moves by itself, lapping the primitive bank.
And who knows if even a ghost can find it?
But I sense the narrow river and its weariness.
I float it in vision and need, as if I'm searching
for someone also lost in a murkiness of liquid.

A last breath comes to all things that breathe.
Yet time continues with a halo of mourning.
Maybe the lost dead can be sought beyond paths,
in the wildest durations of forgotten river moods.

Beyond roads' withering, things become uncanny.
Sometimes I think Southerners hold a few ounces
of slowing light when we die and then disappear.
We ride the air as a quivering above mossy silence,
going down a lost river, gleaming on dragonfly wings.


~ TB