DAVID BLAIR
RIVER GOD BENDS
“Sad grows the river god as he oars past us.”
—John Ashbery, Flowchart
If you have never cooked up
cheapo fiddleheads
turning black in their
soft blueberry cartons,
the green pulp of them
smells, and so tastes
like green riverbanks
of scrubby weeds
for the entire spring,
or maybe this should be
the other ways around,
and the riverbank
smells (tastes)
like fiddleheads,
and then recesses
away from this alertness
that has a tough
weasel on a rock
saying, “Dare me,”
which is how my friend
the game warden
described a stare-down
with a bad twist
of muscle on her beat,
the shock of river again
can really get to you,
put your nose out of joint.
You can get crop-dusted
by the combined
overflow of Watertown.
Smell though is not
an accident, the start
of the imagined,
substantial grease
in the hair held
by the pony tail’s cinch
where the sweating
musician joins
the chorus
of “Mustang Sally”
for the abstracted
drunks in the summer
citronella
of the patio with a stage.
That fog was weird
glasses of cold water.
I missed Sabrina
so much.
I would
write her letters
that all went, “Hey, listen.”
A river goes by a palace,
what a dump.
These parochial types
need a grand tour
about as much
as the Danube River
needs a hairpiece.
Who could have
a broader swath
of glitter or more
astonishing sleeves
knit with mirrors?
The birds, the fish,
the muskrat head
that fishes around
with unfair advantage
the lily pads,
none of these
in the water smell,
and so from the river
somehow that has
no consciousness
and won’t jump
out like a river god
to complain about death.
I get suburban nervous
as exurbias encroach on cities
here. I don’t want flour
to get all over my pants
if I need bread,
but I do want
to see woodchucks rolling
along or even a chipmunk.
We’re all accidents.
The July bushes
smell of anisette
by the Mystic in Medford.
How did I learn lore,
to see these people
except I felt welcome
and was not cuffed but
confided in, kidded
and not killed. Not yet.
Take a bit of nature
back with you, the river
and the weird birds.
The baseball diamond
in the park by the river
smells of dandelion
and mown clover dust
named for dead aldermen.
Now full sails of cut grass
ride the mowers. Ride on.
DAVID BLAIR is the author of five books of poetry and a collection of essays, and he teaches poetry in the MFA Writing Program at the University of New Hampshire. His most recent collections of poetry Barbarian Seasons and True Figures: Selected Shorter Poems and Prose Poems, 1998-2021, are both available from MadHat Press.
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