Dear river teach me how to stay float jellied

and slick-limbed through interruptions, teach

me the original names of tadpoles, corrugated rust

flickering elegies, how to bear and bare grief’s

viscous currents, the weight expanding the chest

to make room for salamander feelings, flowering

and blushing reptilian, teach me what moves

with wind as I am lost, am losing whatever battles

time wages in the wake, trapped in the bones

of a body even the flailing stars fail to immortalize

as I am lazy and taskless, stacking endless cardboard

boxes one atop the other in an open-roofed warehouse,

midnight piping fugues through crevices, river show me

your scars, your crushed velvet bruises and buck-

toothed zippers, which if I correctly geolocate

you will entrust me with revealing, if not shadow

me as my feet score your banks, the tracks that form

patterns not even your deities can decipher, too busy

appearing as naiads with algae-clumped hair and pebble-

encrusted lips swimming in your riparian tenements,

clouds forgo their designated stations, backstroking

Olympic-length sky-lanes overhead, is this all part

of what pivots before vanishing, submitting as slide-

decks, silver-toned and -tongued, can there ever be

a future I refuse to imagine, suffering from vertigo

of extinguished fauna and flora’s lament-wracked fire

and amnesiac algorithms, river please

lull me with your warbling alto overtop the growling

jackhammers, ferry me on your back to the caverns

sweating unresolved questions, deeper down tunnels

until finally I reach a room decorated as a mid-century

office, oak paneling rank with peat, moss-green carpeting

spongey underfoot, Old Spice fighting with wet

fur earth-scent, swirled cognac, leather swivelling

chair with its seat still warm and in walks my dead father

and though he cannot recognize me in my new state

as a piece of driftwood, he stoops to pick me up

with both hands and places me on the desk beside him

Open Letter to the Humber River

Documentary