Fluvial

 

Rivers are the well-made, self-created music. Demarcated by the deep incisions of water the land is stated by its gullies and valleys, is guestimated against the availability and level of water in motion. Land thinks back at every river turn to its fortunate maintenance. Creatures think back even when going to the tap. These prolonged evolutions over continental enormity course to the living bud, speak in the cortex, before there was ancient, I am. Smoothed stones throw up history at every turn, they are the instruments upon which water now runs off in swift and churning sounds. The banks, from alpine beaches of egg smooth, down to platypus stillness, down to rooty rushing overhangs, down to idle grassy walk-on parts, even down to gorge depths, or up along artificial canals and through cranking mills, control the unmistakeable continuance which is history of self-construction and survival, the music of the calmest and uncalmest unabeyances. Glistening over a rounded surface, white through the drops and cuts between various edges, slow and clear where reeds stretch its lengths, water reverberates the inner ear and contents the body with flowing. Waiting its turn at a corner, eel-curvy fish-flicking, before cascading into black below the gaze, river is together and plentiful whatever the weather or the state of the human mind. The world would not exist without certain things: bees, the moon, rivers. The mouth would pucker and shrivel without certain things: saliva, bread, rivers. The body would want for analogy without a lover, young trees, rivers. A city would be a heap of mud and timber without a market, new words, the music of a river. To live in the belief that your voice will be near again comes from being close to families, a longing, a loss, memory of laughter, and a river. A crime and its aftermath will not seep away, they will be tried because of families, eyes that shine, the need to be fed, morning birds, the consoling waters of a continual river. Dreams are not the sole escape, drugs are not enough, and meaning itself resides in how the words are translated by the body, because somewhere at the end of your street or the streets connected to your street or at the edge of your region or in your desert factualness there flows the river that is your river. Musicians could not breathe, lawyers could not count, plumbers would look foolish, without rivers. Birds could not home without the perfect grid point straggle of your river. The moon would be an unglistening boulder of choke dust without your cool gliding river. Fruit trees and the iris beds and the pongy profusion of white daisy bushes, and the higgledy-piggledy behind the glasshouse, would be an abstract expression, an insignificant other of book people, without trees that grip to the river, without bees supping on the river in infinitesimal circlets, without the hand that is your hand lifting life up from your river.