Maji Moto

7 September 2010

We are in an unstable atmosphere. The river is rising and its current is strong. Night storms bucket-dumped into the St. Croix Valley and lightening seared its sides. The thunder rumbled softly first but then pinned me, crouching and drenched, to step 73 up the bluff. Now the river is swollen, bloated, and hungry for more. The tide is stealth. It snatches stumps and lazy logs. One Mississippi, two Mississippi, their slick and knotty snouts keep the current's time. An empty bottle of bourbon shuttles downstream, the shell that gave shape to somebody's I am filled with regret or I wish you would call.

Tomorrow, when startled herons swoop their goodbyes, beavers will waddle down shoreless, shortened banks like pudgy ladies catching a bus. The fish will jump. Good little streams will come tumbling down and then somersault into the soft palms of the St. Croix hand.

And then when it is dark again, but still, I will paddle upstream while the glass-topped river slides past me like hooded monks in silent prayer. They will quietly carry cupfuls of moon.

I dreamed that I went somewhere else. That flailing limbs gave way first to melting pelts, then to writhing maggots, and finally to heaps of bones. They lay scattered, gleaming, and pretty. Sisters groomed, first one and then the other. And so we build. On hidden histories and piles of bones.

Maji moto, just this side of Kitirua's gate to Amboseli, swells, too, when the rains do come. It is a depression that fills and beckons to buffalo and bathing boys. Lions lounge. Interrupted herds of zebra up-fling their heads and hightail it, chucking their leftover water back into the pool.

Maji moto, and we are in hot water indeed. Glaciers are melting, the wells are running dry, and still there is the private weight and weather of our own days. Where is the aquifer that hydrates your solar plexus? I will pluck out the straws and cork the leaks. Let me lash hinged thimbles to your fingertips. The ten tiny buckets will swing like iron wind chimes when you walk, heavy with the catch of your rain.

I used to have a pony with one brown eye and one blue. Equestrian purists would say she was barn sour, but I think she just had a well-developed sense of belonging. She was fat and the saddle hardly knew her back from her belly. In the late afternoon I would ride her to a borrow pit that had filled with groundwater and she would wade in, to the tops of my ankles and the bottom of that barrel belly. And then when the shadows grew long over Oregon's green-gone-golden grass, I knew it was time to turn the boat around, drop the reins, and let the pony go home.