Poets and Poems - Jack Brae Curtingstall

The Unknowable River

No more can you know its flow than the flow
of blood in your wrist, the branched veins that show
before bedding into the palm of your hand:
the mountain streams that cut the higher land,
that hide the arrowed fish that go where they go.

So you'll climb to the place where the sun's glow
betrays the gravelled channel of springs. No
map is detailed enough or fully planned.
No more can you know

the clear dream of water that moves so slow,
where mountain trout hug the anti-shadow
of speed, the nemesis of ground stone, sand
so fine it niggles deep, grits in your mind
to the eeled spawning-beds of fear below.
No more can you know.

Jack Brae Curtingstall

[Originally appeared on Politely Homicidal]

Photo by Gerard Sexton