to Jeremy
On the morning
You get up before you are ready
Lids sandpapering eyeballs
Mouth bitter with dryness
To let the dogs out
You’re awake
By the time you make it back to bed
Inexplicably weepy
No need for eyedrops before
Starting your hour of morning reading
Switching between Foreign Affairs
And Searching for Sunday
You can’t ignore the soundtrack
Of other generations
Haunting your eardrums
“Dream a Little Dream of Me…”
Ella Fitzgerald croons
“It’s just this time of year.”
You whisper to no one in particular
Your mother’s mother
DeeDee, long gone,
Settles in the easy chair by the bed
Legs crossing at the ankle
Gently nods in agreement
Her mother Mimi perches
On the dresser with a plate of Spritz cookies
That your father, younger than you ever knew him
Poaches to dunk in
His steaming mug of coffee
Harold and Virginia
Together again
Cut a rug
Without the pain of shrapnel or arthritis
By the bedroom door
Transitioning fluidly
To the next song on the
Ghostly wireless
“Beautiful People”
By Ed Sheeran
Papa Earl looks on, smiling
It’s only when your terrier
Bounds into the room
Barking vociferously
At Virginia’s swirling skirt
That the time stream
Tugs you out of the spiraling eddy
By the muddy bank
That is all time and no time both
Washing you away from your ancestors’
Holiday greeting
And pushes you onward,
To whatever awaits you downstream
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Before dawn
The bats take sips of me
Between eating mosquitoes
Morning sun makes jewels of my surface
Ever changing flowing onward
Sleepy birds take their turns:
Drinking, bathing, hunting
Rainbow trout just swallowing a dragonfly
Flying away in the talons of Golden Eagle
Nesting in the tallest oak
Above the feral apple trees
On my marshy bend
Across from the cemetery
Right before I glide under the RR trestle
Just now echoing the clatter
Of the 5:12am Cargo Train
Heading inland from Portsmouth
Tumbling, splashing, gurgling
Turning the millwheel still
I could power the lights and bright screens
Of the computers in the hipster apartments
I roll past
If only people would raise their gaze
From their shiny toys
And see
I keep flowing
My muddy banks bordering backyards, cow pastures,
Forests
Whose needles and leaves give me my brown color
Their roots both drinking and holding me
Onward, onward
To great bay
Where I kiss the salt of brackish waters
And taste the promise of the Atlantic
The deep wild water
The returning Salmon used to sing
To me its song
Swimming doggedly
Against my current
To where they could taste the mud of their birth,
The memory of their ancestors
Planted the seeds of their hope
Before the wind pushed so many sailing ships
Across the churning froth of sea