TRANSCRIPT

I’m Maggie Smith, and this is The Slowdown.

The ocean gets a lot of attention, poetically speaking. There are so many poems about the sea, so many metaphors and images. How could you stand on a beach and look out at the waves, or wade in and let the briny water hold you, without being moved? The ocean is enormous and seemingly endless. When you look out, you can’t see the far shore. And unless you’re in the shallows, when you look down, you can’t see the bottom. Poets have been seduced by the sea’s mystery since ancient times.

But today I’m thinking about another body of water. I’m thinking about the poetic potential of rivers. They’re so often symbols of movement and freedom — like “the open road,” but with water — and countless poems feature rivers in them. Langston Hughes’ "The Negro Speaks of Rivers,” about the Mississippi, is a famous one. And Whitman’s “Crossing Brooklyn Ferry,” about the East River. And Longfellow’s “To the River Charles.”

We can even go further back to Greek mythology and the River Styx, said to separate the world of the living and the underworld. The myth tells of Charon, a ferryman, who transported souls across it in his boat. There’s also the biblical story of baby Moses being placed in a basket, set to float away on the Nile River to escape Pharaoh's decree.

All of these images spring to mind when I think about rivers in literature.

But as an Ohioan, I think most of all about the poet James Wright, who was raised along the Ohio River. (Fun fact: The word Ohio means “Great River,” so Ohio River translates to “Great River River.”) The boundary between Ohio and West Virginia was James Wright’s muse. But it’s not idealized in his work — in fact, it’s often depicted as a violent and haunted place.

Today’s poem carries us to the Delaware River, cold and dark in winter, and also a place that feels both beautiful and haunted.

Crossing
by C. Rees

In winter, the Delaware still
              sluices summer's trash past 
my body in the shallows
off the wingdam on
              the Jersey side. Cold purges 
the banks of mud. Ever-
moving water, shale-black
              and time-bitten, a color reserved
for years-old paintings of the sea.



                                                                                         The season's silt will stay
                                                                                                        until spring brings up all that's buried:
                                                                                         my people knifed with sunlight, hunching the river 
                                                                                                        toward Trenton where the world
                                                                                         took and further east, shambling
                                                                                                        with small devotions: brook trout, sturgeon, 
                                                                                         tomato husks, plastic forks, the tribute 
                                                                                                        of bones. The dead are a species
                                                                                                                    who grow and shrink.



              O, we leapt and speared 
our thighs on rotten Chevy axles! 
              The river's a snarl
thick as gar armor, defiant 
with faces burnt with dye
              from the dead
up-river mills, scribbled with fishhooks, 
unwriting the drowned statue's lips.



                                                                                                                                                                                 Now, I 
                                                                                                                                                                    crawl out steaming 
                                                                                                                                                                    like a dumped skunk. 
                                                                                                                                                                    My father beside me, naked. 
                                                                                                                                                                                 The scar on his spine is
                                                                                                                                                                    A sturgeon seen briefly. 
                                                                                                                                                                    He smiles, I think at me. 
                                                                                                                                                                    The sky is white behind 
                                                                                                                                                                    his head. His teeth are lost 
                                                                                                                                                                                 in it. Then his 
                                                                                                                                                                                 body's steam. 
                                                                                                                                                                                 Then his body.

"Crossing" by C. Rees. Used by permission of the poet.