SUDDENLY, IT'S MID-DECEMBER - THE RIVER

Suddenly, it’s mid-December–the river clenches itself, fish bundle up in the mud–
your grandfather is dead, his forgetting flown into the ether, such relinquishment your
sorrow or nostalgia or both and you speak of leaves, burning–

I can’t help you, in a sense, this is your grey moment–we don’t all die in trucks
by the side of the road, unnoticed for a day, as he did–but we all, invariably,
fall solo out of this world, the brain eroding away from its narratives, stories becoming

the kind of sand we have here–with bits of disconnected machine in it–a cog, a nail,
something else unnameable to me–and so on-from the shore’s old mind I watch you, alive,
him dead, or just appear to be attached to resolution when really, I could be that leaf too,

the bird’s negative capability, intimate with what moves around me, towards, as I refuse
to be distinct about what is air or water, both evident forms of good, you see, and
not those darknesses, dividing us, you choose to imagine.


About Catherine Owen:
Catherine Owen is a poet from Vancouver, BC. She has published nine collections of poetry and one of prose, including the award-winning volume Frenzy (Anvil Press 2009). Her work has appeared in periodicals across North America, Europe and Australia. She works as an editor and plays bass in metal bands. These poems are from a work called The River Sequence. Her website is www.catherineowen.org.