Reborn

Trout dream

like infants must—

stuff of milk and flies

breasts and hooks

their history is not

written but oral

inky and fluid

spawned in bone and meat.

This morning I heard a poet call

her river a splitting headache

perfect I thought

in my world sometimes it’s a dark wound

sometimes the seeping eye of a deer.

My river is only part of the cursive

necessary to transform

my name into lightning—

the I  flowing into E

mesa scaling into the R

swimming over to S

but these strokes take miles

and I kayak only at night.

The lead-cold waterway turns

into a king’s ransom thru moonlight.

Dark water is a dreamer’s canvas

reinvention through moon-mirrored

tributary. Eyes shut I float in

umbilical waterway—

travel in a black-gold script.