Wilma's Saint John

My long hair reaches backward in the river.
Already, now, it twines around my ankles.
Her hazel sorrows strangle me before I drown,
and I will have drowned before I'm dredged from the clays.


Their questions rain on my street and roll to the gutter
where they pick up grease and garbage and bring them to the river
so that her moans are gurgled with plastics and wire
and it is her punctuated throat music that knocks on my sleeping.


The place where he's going already has a name
so that it's like visions of him are there
so that it's only like a vision that he's here
giving him residence in the habitat of dreams, memory, and ghosts.
Just so, the woman upriver is taking my hand by the name, performing a deep water baptism 
in the salt Lethe, that we might peer through such kingdom irons.