our own private zambezi

dawn, the birds chirp

off the glass the sky

looks thirsty

after all that rain

last night;

the sun going down over the gorge, the

river brown swollen, fat

fast moving current

the Guatemalan man, incredulous, that

one would lodge oneself in a small plastic boat

and head out into that.

but, 

the sky is iridescent, high-lit- blue and yellow,

the clouds going purple, pink, strung across the

raging golden sun, the tumult above center wave

a big brown hump - locked in it’s almost vertigo 

inducing, a shifting sluice, the chaos, constrained by gravity

shaping up into one glossy wave.

the morning. the brown is still up.

the feeder looks almost the same, but beyond the trees,

a violence stirs

the low violets are almost all dead, back into the ground

for the next season’s food, and the tropical bloom is upon us.

It’s a long quiet flat fast stretch until the waves kick in, and then

a calm like no other, j-man gets eaten by a wave, unfazed, I’m back surfing, shred

has already passed the tongue and is going straight for the hole where the rocks used to mark the takeout.

i make the eddy and watch two heads disappear into the raging foam, reappear down by the bridge and make it to the rocks, hiking back up. 

the dinosaur sleeps but the waves off her back form and collapse

exploding with a fury I used to think was lunacy

and now is church.

river soaked days

the days had become river soaked

juiced through and through

the rinse of

nostrils, ears, eyeballs even,

the fine silt

from the brown being up, dries the skin,

but grins are wide.

a canoe up the gorge with the kiddo and dog and shreduard, into

the late day sun

and the swallows are back, the dippers too,

it’s the spring that brings

the bugs back to life.

above the z-channel - next day

the eagle has lost his mottled colors

and below the falls, the herons are thick, the ospreys too.

the dark side beckons, and we’ve been

getting flirty.

shred is almost upside down in the boiling eddy, and

j-man is fully squirted vertically wrong side up

in the curler off the room

in between the goal posts of two boats, I’m hauling, safe.

the brown is up

the tide is down

and its another juicy line up over and around the Fear.

into the mottled fish stink of that chaotic

wave train,

watch out!

it's when you're tired that the river hand will getcha.

two laps? why not?