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Up from the ribbon like river rose a high sand wash on the outside bend, and that is how all the bends are created and remain, the river rolling into a hill older than the Indians made of sand and clay, and coming in contact with the high, hard Earth, deflecting and turning. Always the tongue of the inside bend is a flat green grassy land of soft maples – sage-colored silvers and deeper green boxelders.
Up atop the high bank, a birch tree’s height over the river, lay the level open spot, and there squatted one wooden picnic bench fading gray without shade, weathering away one splinter at a time, dried in the sun and heat of July.
Along the edge of the sandy clearing, its back to the woods, stood still an outhouse once painted red, now chipped, ringed with yellow buttercups, a large dead birch branch fallen on its roof. The door is shut, and on its front is nailed a faded poster showing a comical man holding a frothy mug and reading:
“Beer. It’s what’s for dinner.”
I turn away from that and off from the picnic table are the remnants of fires – bonfires or campfires – ringed by brown and yellow and orange hawkweed. No firepits. No rings. No circles of rocks remaining. Time can move even rocks. Just charred wood and black coal. Charred wood doesn’t rot. It only breaks apart and weathers away.
Over the edge of the high bank the tansies struggle to grow. The inch or so of sod falls straight down the sandy slope, the near bank falling away an inch every spring, an inch every deluge, the great high bank falling particle by particle on its way to Missouri, to Mississippi.
To the left the river goes upstream, quartering left and up. To the right the river runs downstream, up and to the right. It is colored iced-tea and shallow, so in the riverbed you can see the rocks and boulders, the sand veins, and mud on the far side under the big maples, and the white, dead clams tiny in the distance like stars in the water.
Look southwards over the trees and take in the forest and to the horizon and the horizon disappears in the heat.
There’s no one here.
For a good long while I value the solitude, here high on the bank in the summer sun and rising breeze, along the wild river atop the washed-out, collapsing sandbank.
Then I think a thought.
There’s no one here.
What kind of world have we created in which there is no one else here?
What kind of life have I created where there is no one here with me?
So, I sat with gentleness on the picnic table and wrote a poem about the way it once was.
There was a girl I knew
from the North,
Who wore worn leather
Birkenstocks
And faded jean cutoffs
And T-shirts and hats of
the BoSox.
Among all those prime
young bucks,
She chose to listen with
me! – me –
To Simon and Garfunkel, To Peter and Paul, and
Mary.
She was the kind of
young woman
You could humor from
the page.
With a poem of daisies
and susans,
In a meadow of tansies
and sage.
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