The River Children Come of Age
Those first years we lived above the river,
Christ, we were insatiable,
screwing our heads off in the kitchen,
on that floor you stenciled yellow,
and gave no thought to children
or the future, or the dead;
and, indeed, the dead
in time came to the river,
and the ghosts of children,
demanding and insatiable,
calling for that yellow
kitchen
within this new six-burner steel kitchen
where everything that lives is dead,
and a silent cat stares through slits of yellow,
and its owners fear the river;
and only the night is insatiable,
and there are no children;
and the friends who laughed like children
as we caressed each other’s spouses in the kitchen,
six of us, one Christmas night, stoned and insatiable,
they are all dead, those others, dead;
the last one buried somewhere upstate near a river
last October, on a day the red and yellow
leaves made crazy patterns like that yellow,
red and green linguini we hungry children
hung to dry above the river
in a whirling, smoke-filled kitchen;
the lights of passing barges glinting off the dead,
flat, cold and bottomless water, insatiable
for everything that one time seemed insatiable;
and eventually the skin will yellow
and the nerves below the knees feel dead,
and we are again children,
huddled in the kitchen,
shades pulled against the river
as a low, late sun tints the kitchen chrome and yellow;
slanting off the river, crying that the dead
are all insatiable; and that there are no children.
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