A.S. Coomer - Riversong (Memorial Potamology) Lyrics

As we lay low
Another of the gifted
A stray feather flutter-step dancing
Above the shifting snowpack
Drifts down to join the snowmelt
Another drop in the flow
Downstream, the dream everchanging
You'll never wade out into the same river
No one ever does
Life a timelapse of the flood
We count the hours by the silt rings
Left on the sodden warping walls
With each tick a lessening
Recession gradual but never quite complete
Nature's song swells
We bleed as we sing

Those left behind
Met at the haunt
A flotilla of ghostships
Circling a single, tired mooring
22 songs for leaving
We offered up our songs
Words swirling skyward in cloudsmoke
Raining down on brittle snowcrust
Easing towards a lessening
Erosion, sure, but welcome
Against choking alluvium
Our vice hardened hearts clotting
With detritus, mangled branches
& shorn shingles, mistakes & reckonings,
Otters, coots, and mallards displaced
Rain-soaked refugees wading
Through muck and debris
Seeking new, higher banks
Just like the rest of us

There are those that take advantage
Use the roiling for dumping off
Tires and garbage, old appliances
& the lapped smooth stones of need
You can find them on the bridges
Shifty eyes scanning for witnesses
Dropping what is bald and useless
End over end ending in a splash wave
Lost in the tumultuous brown churning
The waters accept with indifference
Burying under or carrying along
Another abandoned verse of riversong