The River Poem by Peter Eliastam

Broad-beamed matriarch, the river
swaying, torpid, acquisitive by slow degrees
of the philandering sun, riffling energetic
fingertips among the reeds for crocodile;

gravid matron, meandering many times
before the fish, frenetic in the flushes of
her spread, made her inquisitive for more among
the rushes, avid for its stamina –

or yet another child, begotten from the air
by kingfisher, fish-eagle chick, or calf, or fawn;
eclectic river, to the selvedge of a yawn,
replete with smile, mile on mile.

Languorous, electric on her bed, the fondling
of the crass cascading watercourses, down from
fount to maidenhead, to mount her rippling
retreat with adolescent fire

in their feet and pebbles on their faces,
hieroglyphics of the unfamiliar places grown
irresistibly familiar to the river, restive,
at the apogee of folly:

swollen with the solace of her strangers,
valley-dame, escorted by exquisite dangers,
hunters, fishers, dilettantes of dabbled gunshot,
volley after volley, somewhere from the flank

where duck dropp dead into the tank of
irretrievable forgotten facts, and floating,
scurry on towards the cataracts; the river
narrows to the cleft at the ravine.

Compelled against her will, this has-been,
old with arguing, urbane in her opinion still,
arrested, channeled bank to bank, half yielding to
pleasure, half to pain, rolling to the lull

of leisure at the verge, before the edge,
to lounge malingering, and loiter while the
babblers on the boulders rabble-rouse, the river
shrugs her shoulders to the brim.

She dawdles to carouse again. The moorhen
and the coot back-paddle, wary of the brink.
The frog upon his haunches stops to think about
the scary heron, hunched, concentrating.

Brazen lady at her execution, far from
discomposed, narrowing her noose into a necklace,
snaps the clasp closed at the high command of
cliffs beside her, slips towards

the brim of her decided indecision,
palais-gliding to the platform at the check-point,
faltering, to fall, colossus in collision with
herself, jettisoned in torrents, catapulting

thunderheads of clouds and stupor, river
wrung to her innumerable deaths in vapour;
dislocated harridan, back-broken on the rack of
signals flung furlongs to the foundering

whirlpool, bottomless in echoes and equations
of her long-lived plunging, somersaults to slack
and buoyant respite, to relax upturned, dazed
beneath her high-rise and her origin.

Concussed and addled optimist, the river –
floating on herself, reprieved, lies languidly
surveying her reflections in the sky’s preambles,
matronly, regathering fragmented faculties

for elbow-room, moves on to smoothe
momentum, headed for the sea. Uncomfy in her corsetry
she circumnavigates the bend, preparing to descend
from bygones and constraints onto the plain,

and there undoes her stays, proffering her
generous relief to herds of cattle, purveying plenitude
to irrigation schemes and promise to the dreams
of wild-oatmen and of farmers.

Water-boatmen, tickling her mind’s meniscus,
hectic as the lancing swallows in their season,
reason for the ample river to be loose and dancing
easy with her hippopotamus –

her otter and her riverine baboon,
her retinue of escorts to the broad lagoon.
Her borderfolk, soon to view her bedfellows’ undoing,
Abandoning her flanks – retreat.

The crab-clan, cagey, scuttling its corridors,
withdraws into its cantilevered banks to calculate,
gesticulating with it’s claws. Indisposed to pause,
she undulates towards the tanks of turbines

set in jaws of steel. Capricious river,
disinclined to feel her sub-aquatic course of conscience
lulled by habit’s long declension and a host of alibis,
denies the imminent escarpment’s fall

into the cataclysm. Processional, imperious
in condescension, pomp and stride, masquerading
as the ocean’s bride, parading pride before her
Equerries, her high-noon crucifixion unforeseen.

Her ending had been intimately kissed
with promise bound in new beginnings of high calling,
her falling future but the foil for mercy and for grace.
But the Author of her destiny had hid His face.

Before her fluid form had sprung to lissome
adolescence from the eyrie of the mountain’s breast,
where suckled in her infancy, she had been pressed up
close against the rockface of the eagle’s nest,

bejewelled by the sun, her siren’s song
as yet unsung, her dappled heart’s intent was ever
set since her nativity, upon the aquamarine shore of
wedlock with the sea. In spurt and spangle

of her summer sun-starts after rain,
tempted once again to dally here, to shilly shally there
with valley-wind or wanton water-sprite for
music or for laughter – coquette, she plays

the royal concubine, declining chaste
emblandishments for stronger taste of brine,
their consummation in the pounding surf’s embrace,
at last the ocean’s interface and queen.

but this was not to be. Pneumatic river,
sprawling at the hour of her late undoing,
rising ominously pressed between her hedging
and her welling up, to enter

at the apex of her mind’s evasion,
fighting apprehensions to the quick of the occasion,
doubt evicted, pounding heart resounding maledicted
to the sounding deep’s espousals,

fast rotating and convicted
in the belly of the whirlpool to be sick.
Her nuptial hope deferred, she flounders frantic –
foaming to the fulcrum at the lip

into the funnel, welling up again
to teeter and to dip into the tunnel
spilling, breaking through in reckless ranks of
blind elation, rushing, racing, swirling

milling into turbines drumming,
humming, soaring to decline in death’s
unnumbered dyings, culminating in her volume’s
plummet to oblivion, her roaming done.

Her frozen, all but frigid ancestry was gone –
Its fluid dallyings reflected in a watery memorial,
her grave beneath the unforgotten stave, surreal
with camouflage of clouds.

The folded shrouds of her compulsive
escapades, now dry, where once cascades
had run from shallow runnels into revelries
up to the lintel, risen to the lure –

Impure, polluted with her liver-fluke infested
flume, she had become contaminated fever-food;
her stagnant lower levels were a sewer of
excremental stools, their pools malarial.

Life’s Highest Fountainhead, had heard her cry
for cleansing and communion in the Secret Place
of Thunder, under Whom her waters had run dry,
evaporated on her trail of disgrace –