By Tamarah Rockwood

Look: it ripples upon the water, this crumbled moon.

Drowning in a shoreline pocked with decayed pilings,

Against the abandoned building garland in graffiti,

Among the ruins of the mill market unfurled and unfettered

In the surge of mortality — there; the heron steps.

The overly grayed fisherman who rises with the dawn,

Whose precise prowl to pierce the funereal water,

To strike the waning lights that shimmer on the river.

Long have I sat on these deeply pebbled banks

Under former moons, listening to pocket radios

Bounce our river aria off of these renounced relics

of ambition and bone; silent as gravestones.

And then, the heron’s heavy gray plumage

Shakes from tail to shoulders and shuffles off

the remains of dew at the ever advancing dawn.

Surely, as this light so greedily devours our hours,

As the mill devoured the acres of Ash, of age,

And carved tracks of time across the dark harbor

To be loaded onto trains hauled on long tracks through

Cleaves and leaves and veins of plains,

It is the silence of dawn that devours us like the heron

Who has also feasted on countless minnow.

My father was the one who trained my eye

to follow the light of the moon that illuminates

these quiet occasions between the noons.

With percolated coffee, we sat on unfolded chairs

That held the harvest of these memories whose yield

of seasonal leaf, fish, and feather carried

Upon the protean surface of these babbling rivers.

When I was young, I thought stories were cast in stars,

Plotted out in myths and tales of friends and fables;

but Cassiopeia is weakened in attrition

As time flows through to change her position.

My eye fixes on the fidelity of the moon to meld

These overly grayed, crumbled flashes of my father’s fading form.

In these crisp clear nights, when the month

Has outlived its time and the sky is full

Of this reflected glow that steps out so tenderly

With the tide, I throw pebbles into the water

That bring to life long looping circles that stir

The kaleidoscope snapshots of moonlight,

My face, my father’s chair, the heron, and

The hulk of the abandoned mill behind us.

I train my eye, in this gravitational silence,

To follow the ripples that do not lie in ruin,

But live in the crumbled moonlight

that flood this starless river.