I have come to the river to heal.

The birch trees make arches far above me,
holding their wooden arms side by side in long lines
up and down the bank, facing another long line
on the opposite shore.
Each tree has its own posture, its own bent, its own groove,
as if a long line of dancers were suddenly frozen some ages before.
These lines face each other
And the river runs between them.

The river comes with a breath of wind,
rolling from some upstream time past,
the water and golden leaves the only moving things, but most slowly,
as if just now beginning to move after some long glacial freeze.
And they carry the whispers of the music,
which is the only thing that that did not freeze entirely,
but drips still from icy thaws that flow through this calm
towards a crashing froth I hope for
some time very near to now
and down river.
I have come to the river to heal.
To listen.
To see if I can catch the tiny music that once animated this place.

Staring into the brown, I see there and here
a flash of lightness through the muddy water
as though great fishes run below where they can be seen.
But they are not fishes. They seem to me to be
flanks, or faces or bodies moving through the water.

In the near silence of the shore I take one step
where the water laps the mud
and it seeps into my shoe at the toe
and my sock gets wet and I pause
and take another step and plunge a foot into the river
and it is cold and surrounds my foot in a new atmosphere.
I take another step
and the water wicks with greed and weight on my pant legs.
It is pulling now. And I can see the flashes more often
as if they are welcoming me, and cheered at my coming.
This close to the water it is not so quiet anymore,
the surface tension resonates with the world above,
and a music below and the memory upstream
and the promise down
into a hazy, buzzing, piping of sound as the water climbs my
neck and touches the bony place behind my ears
and I am jerked under the water
and the music is clear and loud
and the fiddle and the banjo break into focus
and a woman takes my hands and turns me around
and smiles into my eyes
and then looks aside at her neighbor and opens her arms
to bring our circle into four
and we circle as four
and smile into each others' eyes
and we balance our circle and pull against one another
and pull against the music
and open our arms
until we are in a long line up and down the river
and we face the other line across the bottom
and we step toward each other and these two great lines
of water dancers balance to honor one another.

Why do we dance?
To be sure when we swing and hold each other
in our bodies and eyes hungrily we wish
to find someone to devour in a lustful quench of jaws.
The water is thick with our streaming juices.
But also awash are the pains,
the grieving, the lovers lost, dreams escaped,
the cancer, the suicides, the children misborn,
the injuries to body and soul.
We dance in this soup,
and hold each other in our bodies and eyes
and hold each others' hands
and circle.

On the shore, the birches retain their silent poses.
Unaware of the clamor below the river running at their feet.
In the end, it may be the music, the tiny breath of piper's wind
that from its unknown source in the icy mountains
grows to a roar, a pelting, driving, rushing river of wind and sound,
a flood against which nothing can cling,
but all the frozen bark rime and crusted pain
and memory are washed into the rapids
and float and churn and spin away down river
leaving only these two lines of dancers,
with new eyes that do not remember their spell,
fresh and naked, staring at each other across the river, asking
"Why have we come?"