St Clair

River in my mind
seething turquoise stream
your shores sprout towers
of brick, cement and steel
prodding vaults of haze where
sky should be

Great highway primeval,
course of salmon, smelt and pickerel
teeming as ice breaks
ten thousand springtimes long
subdue the lowly cowering land,
sweep the claptrap wharves and refineries
from Earth's muddy shins

In your oily brackish bays
where mallards and mergansers alight
fluffy yellow offspring struggle
against your swirling eddies
scooping minnows 
in their joyous tender beaks
as lives feed on lives in endless chains
from stark northern wilderness
to vast abundant seas

Jagged boulders of frozen violence
on relentless downstream journeys
scrape the hull of a Great Lakes freighter,
her diesels throbbing, oil smoke billowing
as she struggles determined to defy
the river's fury, as floes close in 
obliterating everything but a dream
of her passing

River St Clair pounds rhythms
of dim pre-human rites,
this vestigial raging pulse
of the last Great Ice ebbing,
dying while the civilized world clings
to the lonely ancient strand:
a dying breath too long endured
for brief mind to understand


1988