photo: ralph murre
Sight Lines
by Richard Merelman
Whenever we get together, my sister
goes on
about
the beauty of rapids, puddles, ripples.
She speaks
of
a thunderstorm that announces a rainbow
or
of a sprightly trout run behind her
barn. If a cold autumn
kills
her young sycamore, it doesn’t matter
because
the stream remains a fisherman’s paradise.
During
droughts, the brook becomes a rivulet
connected
to
Lake Oneida
the
summer months. My sister welcomes
thaws
as water scrawls, calls a drop of
water
courageous for opening an ice dam to
light.
She
refers to hot springs
as
infant waterfalls, and to a month of
drizzle
as
an April shower. Water-soaked
Communion wafers
she
describes as doubly holy. Lovely enough stuff,
while
a few yards from my cabin on this slough of the Hudson
silt
and slime and sludge congeal into a beige paste
that
settles behind abandoned backwater shacks.
Last
week I wrote my sister about the snapping turtle I found
upside-down
at the edge of a jetty, claws gnawed, stomach
gutted
by hovering buzzards. The odor of the
swamp
across
the road causes my eyes to water. Marsh
grass
strangles
lily pads that used to float on the surface.
Three
miles north, the river unfolds into a pastel fan. But here
the
channel narrows, slackens, spawns a greasy sheen.
Every
Easter I vow to visit a pastor. Always,
a sheath
of
fog sets down, like a swarm of black flies.
I
could drive through the darkness to Mass,
though,
as I tell my sister, I never go. When
she asks me why,
I remember the bloated
carp in the shallows. It’s the things I see, I say.
~
first published in Verse Wisconsin
