Alone on the Deschutes

by Elly Bookman

There is a morning, and there are
brown eyes rising somewhere
against a dense piano bass line
meant to begin things.  This river

has come to fill in the dug – out canals
with whitecaps cropping up so far between
that I learn the catch of that dawn

and fear floating off: there is the return
as my now still, different self

to the city I left still growing.  Now

standing just before it all comes into day,
when the light lands like a bruise

at my feet and aches in the air
around me, there is barely breath left
to convince against the improbable

second love: I believe it unique,
capable of encouraging a big eddy
around my whole inside song.  And there
is the gleaming, auroral blindness.