"That Immense Breath"
By Matt Smythe
Yesterday on the river,
the old man spoke in roiling current
and half-buried bleach-white branches.
Heading upstream, hugging the shoreline
to avoid thousand-yard barges and the Coast Guard
tug snagging stranded buoys,
we paddled past lifetimes of conversation
gouged from the rip-rapped banks, fast forty,
fifty-foot trees beached thirty-foot above water-line
like broken toothpicks discarded after a dinner
of catfish, fried okra, black-eyed peas and sweet tea.
When you’re on the Mississippi you’re on river time
I kept waiting for something to happen.
We made a fire among driftwood on a sandbar
and boiled water for coffee while the river slipped past
silent as the smoke from the black walnut we were burning
I crossed the tracks of beaver that had gnawed down brush
and dragged them to the water, a raccoon’s small hand prints
following the waterline for dead fish, the ghost of coyotes
wrestling around higher up the bank-
tails swishing sand, pays, bellies, backs and snouts imprinted.
The river is down 18-foot from normal
for this time of year and we’re all taking advantage
When spring sends its runoff
from the Continental Divide and Ohio River valley,
from Canada and the northern plains,
our tracks here will be washed away-
disappearing in that one immense breath.
Matt Smythe hails from the Finger Lakes region of western New York. An Army veteran and lifelong outdoorsman, Matt suffers from an inability to sit still. If he’s not in the woods, or on the water, he’s scheming ways to get there. His work has appeared in Free Range American, Gray’s Sporting Journal, the Fly Fish Journal, The Drake, Southern Culture on the Fly, Revive, Midcurrent, TROUT Magazine, and a handful of other non-outdoors-related magazines and literary journals. He recently published a book of poetry with Dead Reckoning Collective titled Revision of a Man, where this poem was originally published.
What’s happening at VetRep…
If you missed it live, you can still watch our final Write Loud of the year featuring a message from Scott Mann, and poetry from s.p. burke, Anthony Roberts, Chris Madsen, and Dex, right here on our Instagram page.
Listen to our latest podcast with the whole VetRep team here.
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