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            [This was one of the last of my early prose poems, written shortly after I arrived in Brazil]

How to Describe a River

            It takes time, normally, for water to inscribe a relatively permanent mark on the earth’s surface. Hence, the antiquity of the words used to describe it: rivers, lakes, mires.

            A river: something it is impossible to embrace. Hence the neurotic debonair quest for origins; the melancholy of seeing one pour itself out into the sea; the sadness of abused estuaries.

            A river describes a line no geometry can formulate, showing up with merciless accuracy, every strength and imperfection, every weakness and resistance of the underlying land it slowly scours.

            … And there are rivers, it is told, in the heart or horn of Africa, that discharge their mighty bodies of water not into an ocean, but into searing desert sands in one last epic gasp of evaporation, translated by a distant but omnipotent sunlight into vapor and air.

            No need to describe a river: its banks, the boulders, pebbles pushed patiently, wearingly along its bed, the willows washing their hair mournfully in its still green bends, the white exhilarating rush down mountainsides; lilies, trout, swans, waterfalls. No need to describe a river. A river is its own autograph.