Song for Oquossoc

// Allison P. Brown

You will never leave the river
of my throat; song of canoe scrape
on stones, paddle’s murmur
to the water, eerie loon calls
as the crickets deafen dusk.

Where I learned to navigate
your crumbled rock on riverbeds,
stand attentive with the pines,
satiate bugs with my blood,
and leap from cliffs to numbing ravines,
wash the sap off my wrists.

I felt the prism of trout’s slick skin,
deft song of the swift crack
of the neck with thumb firm under jaw.
Lift, vertebrae by vertebrae,
the spine and ribs from feathery
flesh, not leave one threadlike
bone inside.

I learned to sleep wary and alert,
bobcat skin lurching over the rafter
towards my bed, wake
with the dew, to savor
the ache of lake-cold bath
spreading over my skin like the form,
the face of my mother, my grandmother.