Riotous wild flowers defy
the vandal winds of noon
a ruler of skies and river
retracts his wings
careening
talons outstretched
into the rapids below the dam
I watch and conjugate “ I am” in several dead languages
may the tongues whose words for the movement of water
the finite expressions for the consistency of snow
and the constancy of love
may poesy that long ago ceased its harmonious continuum
when the river stopped
cry out in counterpoint with the rapids again
we walk among the blossoms and the driftwood bereft of literacy
as scriptures encode themselves
in the pagination of windblown silts
respelling the gorge through millennia.