Side A Hybrid: “Riparian Way” by Marilyn McCabe

Rains have gone. Dry
days settle. The stream:
trick, trickle, murmur of
a former self, whisper of a way
half-borrowed from old courses,
half-bullied with melts and storms,
wrinkle of ancient bed of sea,
ice-scoured, slopping buckets
of boulders, scree, writes
a history in erratic and rubble.

Watching the stream and the river this summer has been an accounting. The river grows a foot, drops inches, grows inches, eases back a foot. The stream, sometimes a step ahead, sometimes behind, inches up, inches back, swallows, spits out, darts around. Now leaves in the trees are yellowing early, look labored after the high heat and hard rains of the strange season. We’re all a little exhausted. Except the midges that gig in front of my mouth as I stand by the stream. They seem ebullient. There’s a party going on right here in the whirl of my exhalations.
In childhood I lived on a dead end street, macadam ending in a dirt road down into an old quarry where I was not allowed to go. Down there was the creek—pronounced “crick” in those parts, and that I could only go to the crick when taken by an older sibling made it a place of mystery and fascination, a place I remember more in its absence, the tales told of it, than any familiarity gained by scant visits. I learned to swim, reluctantly, in a cedar-brown lake nearby and the terrible chlorine of the Y. We moved away before I could grow old enough to go to the creek alone.
Years later in a return as a young adult, accompanied indeed by these siblings, I launched myself out over the creek on a rope swing. But, being unaccustomed to such things, I hadn’t kicked off hard enough, and didn’t swing back far enough to get my feet on the bank. My brother had to reach out perilously and snag me, hauling me to safety.
I have a similar story of the sea—little and tumbled by a wave, sand-dredged and topsy-turvy and plucked from the surf by the other brother, laughing. I love to be by the sea, will stand for a long time watching the waves, my feet in the slipping sand, waves around my knees. But the last time I swam in the sea caused a massive ear infection. I’m a water watcher, not a swimmer nor boater. I am lured to, and leery of, water. But I’m riparian by nature: of the riverbank.
Here I walk on rolling stones like small heads. A terrible image with which to think of the dead. To think of what is astounding: the skull, that sculpture of curve and hollow, socket and maw. I think of the old man who raised goats here, and of the families that settled along the river farther down, and the ones who passed through, and of the deer, long dead muskrats, mink, and beavers who must reside somewhere in the dirt, tiny skeletons of mice and moles. Think of the scrawny bone frame of grouse, slender ribs, what might be considered hips, what could be thought of as a wrist, and where the beak was, now shattered to shards in the rubbled soil.
The angles of some shores show the opposite, its shadow shapes are an ocean away. But here the earth has folded, creating in places a confusion of time. A fossil bed not far from here is irruption and erosion and things seem to have walked together that never did. We persist in disentangling this history, parsing part and whole, then and gone. Some search for beginnings, some the markers of the end times.
It is poignant, this human hunt, this determination to understand, and so to predict. Determined too to ignore our own predictions, drown them in slogans, brays. Some warned of the viruses, some foresaw the floods. We touch the tinder with our fingers, feel its dry state, but strike the match anyway. I wonder whether some generation of us will grow wiser, or is it truly that the more things change the more they remain the same. The history of the human species in the world is a push-me-pull-you of curiosity and atrocity, kindness and cruelty, war and wonder, humanity and insanity. The match and the fire.
I imagine in the history of the world, rivers were always a way, and the jagged edge of coastlines, migrations of all kinds following the flow and the abundance within and beside: finned, feathered, and furred; winged and quardupedaled (sad for us humans, two footed but unwinged). A glimmer in moonlight, a hush through trees. The desert folk, even, must trend to the arroyos. We know the roots of trees wander far to furnish the leaf and fruit what’s needed, underground, feeling their way to hidden rivers. Isn’t water what we look for in every far planet? We’ve named every lake bed on the moon, as if they too are wishes we hang on that hard-working orb. Deluge or drought, things are thirsty.
Rivers around the planet defined the wayfaring. Although some proto-beaver discovered dams and diverting, I suppose, and taught us earthworks. And the efforts of flora dried up the edges of the vast wet over time, building banks and solid forms from decay and detritus. Is this how it happened?
Liquids and solids. Story of the planet. Rivers and streams and seas draw lines and we follow, we who need water. All of us that need water.
All the water that will ever be on Earth is here, just spread around unevenly, berg and cloud, bog and saguaro, you and me. When it rains, it …, well, sometimes you get what you need. Sometimes more than you bargained for. My body is 55% water. Some days it seems the world can wring me dry. Some days I’m a font. I don’t sweat well but I cry easily. I’ve read that the content of tears differs depending on what generates them—onion, heartbreak, sad song, cold wind. I wonder about the laboratory that did that testing: Does this make you cry? How about this?
The Earth will hold us for a long time. Until it too succumbs to the grand order of destruction and creation. It is hard to hold that idea. The days are cooling here, this time of year. Through the dark trees a lone leaf in sunspot is falling. Caught in a breeze it rises, and falls again.
It takes all my concentration to stay in this moment, to not think ahead: all the leaves, all the falling; to hold this particular breeze on my particular skin, a skin that is creasing daily with its own floods and droughts, pliable enough to hold all the winks, smiles, frowns.
But even in the moment I feel the old flows, ancient tides, the faces of my beloved dead and strangers, and my living friends. Overhead a small hawk circles, feathers backlit. It moves between me and the sun, slow arc of its intermittent shadow.

Some days the stream sounds like laughter,
conversation. I go to it, pebble and bone
in the flesh of the present day, the stream of
me in the stream.