Floating the Deep Fork

Floating the Deep Fork

With a guide,

And some are fishing,

But I’d rather lie here

On my belly

And slide my fingers along the stream

While the River rolls.

Today the water is like glass,

And even though we’re moving,

It seems the scenes pass to the side of us,

Rather than us through them.

And we’ve voyaged to a place now

Where I’ve never been.

I sit up, to pay attention 

To this feeling in my soul,

That the River has a certain pull to it

That I’ve never felt before.

I turn forward to look ahead,

The River, still eerily motionless,

But something under, a pulling roar,

“This River is ending?” I ask my Sherpa.

“No, it’s going over,” he smiles.

We’re going over the waterfall!

Now the urgency of fate!

Is it too late to take my name

Off this list, wind back the day,

Resist the urge to come on this excursion?

There is no diversion now!

We can’t escape the nature of River.

We’re going to seek out our own level,

And Hers, by her force.

We’re going over the waterfall!

Some have jumped and tried to swim ashore.

I’m alone now with the guide.

I hear him say, “Women are better at this,

Because they’ve given birth.

The earth is a woman, you know,

And the River, an earth goddess.”

His words seem oddly so mundane

In the face of this runaway train wreck we’re having,

But he is calm, like a suicide bomber,

And I am along for the ride.

But we are approaching the roar of the rim,

And in the deafening fall of the water,

I can’t hear him anymore.

I’m falling too, slipping off the raft,

The guide grabs me, holds me tight.

We’re somewhere in the process

Of living, dying, going over,

And he has somehow wrapped himself around me, and

Me around him.

Like twisted salmon, in some perverted version of upstream,

He’s mating with me for life

As we fall, and all I can feel

Is his deepest urge, 

To sex me, to rock me

To my core, til nothing is left of me anymore,

To allow the waterfall energy of his desire 

To shuck me like corn

And eat my seeds

And become something else inside of me

And me, within him:

Our babies, our children.

And finally he has gotten through

And penetrated my heart,

And all this, is what he had to do

To guru me into living.

But I am wildly, madly in love with him,

And he with me, and we’re still falling,

Cascading down, with only the sounds 

Of the water drowning out all of our holy moans and vows.

We’ve going together, now,

Over the waterfall!