Unfinished River Walk Poem by Salvatore Ala

When the water was low
I walked the riverbed
Down the spine of a fish
Cool airflow guiding me
Over river rock islands
King of a summer river
With crown of sunlight
My thoughts drifting
Into rivers of other days
The faces of people I love
Swam through my mind
Like reflections in fluidity
Born of the river now
Confluent with the current
The scales of my eyes dropped
My childhood returned
Flowed out beyond me
Steeping me in wonder
Laying my feet upon the water
Fish drifted above sandbars
Towing their shadows
Water snakes like wavelets
Were seamlessly absorbed
Mirages of inverted gardens
Whose leaves I touched
In the web of two realms
From the grade of the land
I was sunset bound
Around a deep-banked eddy
Death swirled like branches
And I thought of giving up
Until the river widened
Into meadowland without margins
River grasses swaying
With my own thoughts
In some idyllic weightless
Wetland of buoyancy
And stillness all around
Before a kingfisher pierced
The surface of silence
And the current quickened
Picked up its shallow river
Between steeper banks
And spilled down heavenward
I tracked the river forest
And the sunset took me in
As though I'd reached the end
Of the river in myself
And from where I'd begun
The river was returning