blueprints

scaled brevity, their clipped-swishing
tail funneling in everything animal.
Wintertime when I saw them, their
pursed old ladies’ mouths, gaping under
pooled clarity to share some gulled-up gossip.
Their bones, pure equilateral, poked stripes
at base and height, bereft of architects’ errors
or human compensation. I remembered then
your last letter; you wrote you couldn’t
cut another mitre, solder another joint, peel
another bit of glue from between your fingertips.
I’m going to crack soon, you said.
There must be some way to perfection
in this grasping for centimeters . . .
About River of Words | 79
Or because this one, 4 from a thirteen-year-old American boy attending
an international school, is so alert, the work of a young man emerging from
childhood and taking his bearings in the world.
Floodplain,
Bangladesh,
Totally flat
Except for the Chittagong Hills,
Deforestation but lots of grass,
Hill after hill with the Ganges River swimming by
Like the stream of blood in your body.
Near the split delta,
Sons go fetch water in buckets,
The delta in the south
The life force for villagers.
And so goes the Ganges River.
Or this one, 5 which needs no unfamiliar landscape to look at and gave
us a sense of how playful and insouciant and already sophisticated some of
these young people are: a fourteen-year-old girl writing seven haiku on
goldfish (which, she notes, were inspired by two goldfish—Stan and Oliver—by
Matisse, and by Wallace Stevens). One of them reads