The South Fork of the Snake
by Will Wells
Though legs are foreign to it, it knows how
to run—slow eddies and paired currents, fast
and faster. Each swirl coils around my raft.
And whether I startle a moose dozing
in underbrush beside a slow meander
or cartwheel a chute of big water boil,
I’m suspended in time as I submit
to water’s whims. My reflection nods back,
a rippled co-conspirator. Boulders
or snagged limbs concealed beneath the surface
are ‘sleepers’ that can conjure fresh peril
from the psyche of the ever-shifting stream.
But, when islands part the flow, I am the flood
that covers them to find what’s been prepared,
like a beached Christmas morning, just for me.
The truth is that I never learned to swim,
yet I am drawn, Snake-bitten with desire
to be caressed by each of its barbed tongues.
to run—slow eddies and paired currents, fast
and faster. Each swirl coils around my raft.
And whether I startle a moose dozing
in underbrush beside a slow meander
or cartwheel a chute of big water boil,
I’m suspended in time as I submit
to water’s whims. My reflection nods back,
a rippled co-conspirator. Boulders
or snagged limbs concealed beneath the surface
are ‘sleepers’ that can conjure fresh peril
from the psyche of the ever-shifting stream.
But, when islands part the flow, I am the flood
that covers them to find what’s been prepared,
like a beached Christmas morning, just for me.
The truth is that I never learned to swim,
yet I am drawn, Snake-bitten with desire
to be caressed by each of its barbed tongues.
Will Wells has published three full-length collections of poems, most recently Odd Lots, Scraps & Second-hand, Like New (Grayson Books, 2017) which won the 2016 Grayson Poetry Prize, and Unsettled Accounts (Ohio Univ./Swallow Press, 2010) which won the Hollis Summers Poetry Prize. Other poems appear or are forthcoming in Permafrost, Naugatuck River Review, Southwest Review, Evansville Review, Carolina Quarterly, Connecticut River Review, River Styx, Image, Potomac Review, Cortland Review, Alabama Literary Review, Birmingham Poetry Review, and Prairie Schooner.
A 2021 Pushcart Prize nominee, Will's poem can be found in Issue 21 of Glassworks.
