Poem Leaping Like a Fish

Word at the river of night, Anne Marie Rooney

As I stand here
in the delta of this night,

its sediment up
my arms and around my legs

and thighs, and swaddling my hips
and buttocks, and dripping down

the small of my back, I
think about how

this poem began with a line
by Anne Marie Rooney,

Word at the river of night,
and I’m grateful to her

but more to her line that
started this poem and my standing

here all bathed in night
as it moves slowly

between my legs and smooths
my ankles and calves, and then

across my chest like a mud
bath of a night still

so delightfully thick
I don’t want to wake up.

Instead I want to stay
here with the night rubbing

its darkness across my cheeks
and under my eyes in a massage

from the fingers of the source
of this river, a word

so dark in the flow that we
can’t see it until

it becomes this poem, a fish
leaping out on a quiet

evening to make the splash
that makes us look up

from our picnic on the
riverbank where

maybe we say, Did you
see that? before we

look down again
at our melon that is dessert

but also the rest of our lives
drifting on, in swirls and eddies,

into the ocean that just
now rubs its eyes awake.