By the Little Pamet River in Winter

Slipping around the bend
of an instant, a shy,
wingéd thing, a spindleshanks
for hanging a body on,
If the soul can be seen

when it takes on the color of river ice
or a wall of reeds, shapes itself
to a cedar, then to a place where bark
sloughed off a gray pine trunk,

and the river's never the same
river twice, but a mirror to the eagle's
passing rumor and the now-and-then
of geese jockeying down the air
to announce opening water,

then the soul is the river's constancy,
and you are the soul of the river,
great blue, always near,
even on this winter morning -- a lobe
of southern air pushing in until it's April
or October for a few hours again --

ice on the river going, the last
snow under roadside
bittersweet and chokecherry
like edges of seafoam,
the marsh hawk up and hunting,

heron, and you've been hunting, too,
your wet footprints crossing the road,
three toes and a spur, like a line
of tree runes on the asphalt, until that wind
chopping up the bay arrives to erase them.

-- Brendan Galvin