River Writing
This is a page for writing about the river. All contributions of any sort are gratefully received. All voices celebrated. Please use the Contact page to send your own writing.
Livestream 1.May peaks late
to swell and burst the banks of bluebells, drooping in bedraggled crinoline. Spent garlic, rank, in khaki shade despatches podshot. Harts tongue licks pink campion. Hedge speedwell sucks wet moss Kite harries oak. And river? (Chaffinch flirts, cock chafer stirs) I skirt her banks, poke fingers in her dry holes. Dream her water voles. And every living thing demanding write me first. As river carries on She whispers I am symphony; a thousand voices singing, a cappella. Braided energy, too fluid to be fixed in time in lines of black on white. I need a stave and clefs and glides, a chorded alphabet to write her patterns forming from what lies beneath or presses on her skin. Her life is lived colluding with the sun. New harmonies swell up from obstacles and what contains and covers, colours her She dams and swallows, riffles, hollows hard rock, thrums the elements to algal soup. She is the bullhead’s riff on chert The dipper’s luminescent fizz She is a consequence. Her form, her taste, her flow and hue, her chemicals, what lives - or not - dictated by relationship. She’s warp and weft and wave, A dip in where and when, The sum of what and what is not Is river happening Dana Assinder, May 2024 River isRiver is
not place, not thing. A million voices singing, acapella, springing snowdrops into being, dubbing winter’s drum, a bass line fingering the clod. A pulse, a beat, a keeping time. Cacophony of flood released To shallow chatter over chert. To hush, to meet a swelling mouth, to kiss a salty lip To consummate A swallow wings the inrush Spring begins again Perpetuum Dana Assinder, February 2024 RipeIn the gullspit
distance, pipped. Torn and stained and hawed and hipped Berried in abundance. Hear Drunk tattoos drum ink on skin draw sharp blood up juice from the marrow On Black Sunday on the Barrow Drupe stone Flint gorse Chit chat Cricket horse Snake fly dragon rasp Ghost of yellow rattle past Fly fringed eye clocks purple lips and finger tips A vellum muzzle rubs my wet and bletted cheek to polished autumn, just a week beyond the dog days’ end. Change is coming Clammy, warm A horse outbreathes, an almost autumn mist rolls down the frosted future slope of winter Dana Assinder, August 2022 16.01.22
07.20
First light. New day Cow in the delta, Breath stream body steam waking up heart beat heating up cold Morning molecular river bank transfer. Head rush Nose dive Shiver into day. The magpie sun Alights on the back of a black and white cow; almost invisible, present, felt. Dana Assinder, January 2022 |
HeadwaterI've come to crouch by river's tiniest tributary
headiest headwater Where the loudest waterfall is one flint deep And the only significant dam is a sweep of autumn's beech mast pressed against a curl of hazel Where a swirl of bubbles froth and form and pop and then disperse, all in a tumultuous six-inch space where huge ferns overreach the shaded flow where the rattled sound of slipped descent has troubled no-one for millennia and lovers must have sometimes met to drink the blessing of stream's sweetest pleasure over moss. Andrew Carey, December 2023 PatternsI know that duck’s head is related to a dog's
I can see the patterns that prevail. I know that duck's hunger is related to mine. How could it not be? I know that duck's feathered glistening is related to otter's fur. I know that webbed feet are related to fins, and plump breast is related to fox desire. I know that float and tip and tilt and bob are proprioceptive capacities of the brain (mine or duck’s or slug’s or dragonfly’s.) I know that Himalayan balsam, however alienated, hangs open-mouthed, inviting pollened, perhaps dangerous, liaison. I know that willows hang around the river's margin, thick as leaves in rooted gossiping. I know that river's brackish ebb is related to the brackish constitution of my tears and sweat and other liquefactions. I know that ripple’s circulation round a duck is related to the Rings of Saturn and the spread of desert sand and the waves of sound succeeding any explosion of significance. I know that marestails, bramble, ragwort, thistle, loosestrife shape a rough imperative that could reclaim the bank and thrive if only we could make less of ourselves. However can we do that? Andrew Carey, August 2024 BabbleThis babble seems to be some
cotton mouthing babble, making something like a pillow or a pastry with its sound, a beavered babble brook a curling bubble round a bubble wrap of water talk that blithers endlessly then dissipates – not ending - slipping past and stilling into thick brown pool of softer buttered syrup sound of smooth away the ripples into an immense calm but I'm drawn back to drift that ripples thin and beckons to the light and says “I’ll cradle you”, and “how I’ll wash you clean” and “wipe away whatever troubles” into something frothed and meaningless Andrew Carey, May 2024 Evening informationThen hemlock mentions that it's
overseeing everything and leaning down and watching for a sound to gulp and just be ruffled by and says a plant’s a throat - it's obvious, a tube for drawing up the river sap and making milk of flowing stream and finding syrup it can live from. And fern informs the shape and hang of riverbank, umbrella to the backward swirl of foam, and rock is chirrupped by the dimpling of the stream, implacable and firm and making tireless interruption of the flow and nosing upstream for one more evening time. Andrew Carey, May 2024 |