Saint John River

SAINT JOHN RIVER Forest embroidered river, solemn you flow solemn you flow through me; slight-shadowed by brush-stroked clouds solemn you flow. I remember you as a child ideal and fresh as a fantasy, born of roots and rock in the high northern forests; I seemed to know you when you wrapped my feet with chrysalis coolness; you were like the intimate streams I knew in Ontario, carelessly frolicking over shadowed falls behind the woods, rolling flat and slow in open fields beside highways and barns. You became old in an odd mile's distance. Is it because other streams are making you pregnant with their wisdom? Is it because you too are a tourist, enjoying and absorbing, the forest-shawled hills? Is it because you are inhibited beneath the watchful economic eyes of humans? You moved through Fredericton like a fat rheumatoid, seemingly avoiding the bridge pillars as if they held a plague. (Are you mortal?) During the cool-fresh nights you wore the town as a knitted muffler. (Your halfway blessing) Your sluggish path is ruled by the hills,

but soon, I know, outside this life, your patience strong as a million light years of starlight, shall wear them straight and narrow. And in your brown age indifferent tugboats flowed on your surface, their propellers shredding your fingers from the cliff's edge of dignity. The log booms are embalming your last purpose. Quiet you are, clean you are for two hundred miles. Then, in an act of proud insolence against the scythe of death you vomited a city bearing your name upon the shore of Fundy.