A plump duck dips the mallet of his head 
into the ooze of a black swamp.  
Inky geese ski with forked feet on frozen lakes, 
burst beaky holes for the drugged 
and sleeping minnows. In the great bowl 

of the ocean, fishermen taped 
to the hull of their boats by prayer 
hoist heavy, wet nets back onto the planks.   
Laundry spanks the creek rocks, 
and women sip from cupped hands, 
pat clavicles with dripping palms.  
Cowlicked boys arc their pee upstream, 
laughing at the tandem of splashing yellow crescents.
At the edge of the river, 

the newborn’s body, still glazed with heaven, is held 
high up to the light, leaking the last helium of the stars 
as his tiny forehead catches the first pane of sun.  
They plink a drop of water between his eyes
where it shimmies down his temples like the tears
that will fall on the pyre of his withered body 
in years to come.  Agua fresco, agua frio,
aqua, l’eau, l’eau de vie, vive le mayim. 

And two hours after the coed girl 
tailgated three Blue Ribbons
and a pink wine cooler 
on the south fork of the Yuba River, 
she stripped down to her shoestring bikini,
plugged her nose, 
and cannonballed straight into the chutes 
where the drill bit of her body 
twirled and bored 
and stopped 
between two slabs of granite.  
Freezing and stuck 
beneath the bright current of water,
she began to die.  
Downstream, we swam 
in the belly of water.  
They landed two medevac helicopters
twenty feet from us 
and began to be the men
who moved the rocks. Boulders

shifting at the speed of boulders shifting, 
river cops ordering the audience of bathers 
to stay put for safety’s sake.We watched them 

watch her feet hardening, 
watched them try to lift her cold heart
out from the bruised socket of her body,
watched the stones’ turn 
pillow the wet feather of her form
into their hands. Then we became 

the first people swimming in the river 
where she had died, pooled
in the length of her last breath, 
her long hair netted in the same water 
where our hair still dripped against our shoulders,

all of our shivers 
carried away from us in the hurried tumble, 
as we watched them carry her blue form 
back from the bottom of the stars.