The Sky at the Bottom of the River
There are people here in this town, in this dirty river town with this dirty river running through it, who will be quick to tell you that what happened to our father, when he walked out into the river, was that he, our father, in the river, drowned. But us brothers, we are here to tell you this: that our father, when he walked out into the river, no, our father, he did not die. He lived is what our father did. Our father was saved, that night, when he walked out into the river, when he walked out across the river’s muddy water. Yes, our father, he is right now safe and sound and he is more than just alive, down on the bottom of this dirty river, down here where the rest of this dirty river’s dirty river fish live like the dirty river fish that these fish are and will always in the river be. Us brothers, we go to see and to be with our father on those nights when the river’s other dirty river fish aren’t, for us brothers, biting. Those other dirty river fish, we tell this to ourselves, we tell this to each other, they must be hanging out, these fish must be hanging down, down at the muddy bottom of the muddy river’s bottom. And so, on nights like this, us brothers, what we do is this: we take two deep breaths down inside of our boy mouths, and us brothers, like this, we dive down to the river’s bottom. Us brothers, here in the river, down where the water down here is thick and dirty with mud and river and fish, the way we like it to be, us brothers, see, we can breathe. When we open up our boy mouths, this river’s muddy water, it turns to air. It is like this with our father, too. Our father, he was the one of us who taught us brothers how to under the river’s muddy water breathe. Breathe in is what our father told us, the first time we came down to the river to see him, down here at the river’s bottom. Don’t worry about breathing, our father to us brothers said. All you got to do is believe. Believe what? was what Brother wanted to know. And what our father said to this was, Believe in the river, he said. Don’t you see, our father asked us. Our father said, The river is like sky. Then he told us to dive inside. Us brothers, we sometimes do what it is we are told. And so, dive inside, this we did. When we did, when we dove head-first down into the river, the river shattered into a billion pieces. Each broken piece became a star.
Girl Breathes a River
There is a river flowing inside Girl’s body that floats up out of Girl whenever Girl breathes. Brothers other than us might say, that’s no river, that’s just some girl breathing out her girl breath, but us brothers who made Girl and us brothers who believe Girl, we know a river when a river’s what we see. No, yes, us brothers, we know better than to say no to what we see and what we say and what we believe to be true. So what us brothers say instead of us saying no is we say Girl. We hop up on board of our made-out-of-mud boat and we oar our way down along this muddy river that flows, just like a river flows, up and out of Girl’s mouth. Us brothers, we float our made-out-of-mud boat down this made-out-of-mud river. We row-row-row our boat singing songs that float up from the bottom of our boots. Girl breathes a river is what us brothers sing as we dip our mud oars into this muddy water, this muddy river where, sometimes, in some places, it is so muddy that our paddles become shovels digging down into dirt. And this boat that is us brothers’? It is no longer a boat for us brothers to row in. What this boat becomes is, it becomes a tractor. And back behind us, in our mud-tailed rooster’s tail of a wake, we spit out from our singing fish mouths songs that turn into seeds, then seedlings, that turn into full-grown trees: trees that rise up and leaf up from the bottom of this river’s bottom: so many islands of so much green growing in the middle of so much water: so much water that looks so much like mud that it must be mud. And this, brother, are you picturing this? This muddy river that we are now floating down, that we are going down: it is a garden. It is ours for us brothers to keep.
Fish Heads: Revisited, or The Fish Head that Got Away
Once, us brothers, we caught us a fish with a fish head so big, us brothers, we couldn’t cut off this fish’s head. This fish, fished up and out from the dirty river that runs through this dirty river town, when we tried to cut off this fish’s fish head, this fish, it would not die. Us brothers, with our fish-cutting knives fished up out of our trouser pockets, we couldn’t cut through it, this fish, this fish’s big head. We took turns, us brothers did, trying to cut off this fish’s big fish head. We even worked us brothers together, cutting at this fish’s head like brothers, one brother holding onto each end of the knife and each of us brothers sawing, back and forth, back and forth with this fish-cutting knife. Us brothers, we’d seen pictures of men with big men beards, lumberjacks with boots laced up to their knees, cutting down trees like this, working the big-toothed saw blade between them together, cutting down trees so big these men could actually stand up inside the cut that they were making to make a tree come falling down. Us brothers, we sawed like this, back and forth and back and forth, cutting and cutting, chopping and chopping, the knife’s silvery blade singing between us, in our hands, until our hands began to bleed. But this big fish with its big fish head, this fish, it wouldn’t die, its fish head, it wouldn’t let us cut it off. Even when, us brothers, after a time, we took our knife and we stuck it, we stabbed it, straight down into the top of this fish’s big fish head, even still, even then, this fish, it didn’t stop its living. This fish, with this fish-cutting knife sticking up and out from the top of its big fish head, us brothers, we washed our hands of this big fish. Back to the river, us brothers, we hissed these words into the eyes of this fish, and like this, us brothers, we each of us stuck our arms, in up to our elbows, up and inside the big red gills of this big, big-headed fish. And like this, each of us brothers, each one of us standing by the sides of this fish, we dragged this fish back to the river. Go, Fish, we said to this fish. Be free, we said, and we pushed and we rolled this big, big-headed fish out into the river’s muddy water. Like this, this fish, it swam away, it did not say to us brothers thank you or goodbye. But wait, us brothers, we called out to this fish after we’d just told it to go back away. Our knife! us brothers, we cried out after and out to this fish. You forgot to give us back our knife! Our knife, the knife that we used to cut off the heads off of our fish, this knife that we used to gut the guts out of our fish, it was still sticking up and out from the top of this fish’s big fish head. This fish, with its fish head still on it, it didn’t listen to us brothers. To this fish, us brothers, we could not say to it, Good, Fish. Us brothers, we stood there like this, on the muddy edge of this dirty river that runs its way through this dirty river town, and we watched this fish, out and into our river, this fish, it swam itself away. After a while, us brothers, the only part of this fish that we could see was the sticking-up knife, sticking up out of this fish’s big fish head, cutting through the mud that was the river. And then, after a little while more, there was no more knife left for us brothers to see, there was only the river with this fish somewhere down inside it, there was only the moon in the sky and the mud of the river holding us all in this place.