The River! The River! Poem by Frank James Ryan Jr...fjr

So begins my story, strange...

Young woman in tattered clothes,
looking years far beyond her age,
lips move, prattling to herself -
sitting at a pressed-wood table,
imbrued by the fade of black ink,
bladed carvings of chicken scratch
obscene, tho', barely legible,
through wood-grooves and divots
that time and storm left
'long with dark splintered shards
obscuring a soft, clear view.

Then, of course there were-
the hand-happy wood slammers
purging their confetti
of manic emotions
within the un-holy confinds
of a stenched, human bandbox,
mundungus and fullsome.

She has witnessed great horror,
tho' guilty of nothing,
her congenital mental state
offers skewed specifics...,
to validate her insidious
experiences.

Then, suddenly her green eye's
open large, expressively-
as though she'd been deep in dream,
a dream of surreal encounter,
frighteneing her senses awake.

The River! The River! ....she begins to shout;
her pupils dancing with petrified verve.

Then there was silence...for a very long time.....,
for a very, long time....................................-

And tho' it seemed her vibrant eyes
had so much more to say,
her four other senses were stricken,
while she stared into a blue sea of shirts
with numbers on sheilds in shiny silver,
who proceded to defer to those
standing with darker, plain clothes,
with their hideous K-Mart ties
well hung over their belted flies...,
and who strategically made yeoman efforts
to crack the imbrued, skewed stem
of the womans anemic brain...

All for nought -

like attempting to turn a sestina
into an ode

wasting pecious Time!

Time...fascinating...yet ne're a friend to tides or justice.

And so............................,

Two weeks later they found what they needed
to find two weeks sooner than they did.

The body was pulled from a river,
a shallow river...
and had to be thawed
from fourteen days
of an ice-glaced December.

Some silver shields would soon turn to gold
for the yeoman's effort in kind,
for their days and weeks,
of attempting to tap
wine from a carafe of fruit juice...

And the mentally deprived woman
remained true to her story,
and for nights long after
returning back home,
neigbors would be awakened
in the mid-night hours
to the eerie chanting
of the woman in dream.

The River! The River!

Each night a virtual freeze-frame...

Neighbors moved;
Houses gutted,
the land was soon turned over -
yet, to this day
no one really knows what happened
so many years ago.

Old woman, now one-hundred and three,
tho' some sware, a half score more;
self-imprisoned in her house
all by herself...still sticken by time and events.

No one can hear her wallowing by the stove.
Perhaps this is how it must be.

Last June I heard that the river had dried,
and though July rains were in plenty-
the serpentine water-path never drinks;
perhaps this is how it must be.

So ends my story, strange.



© Frank James Ryan, Jr.
2015-All rights reserved