The River in Exile

Vincent Hostak

July 30, 2023

-for Mark

“You could drink the truth in its purity if you went to the source” - John Graves

From the window seat of the plane

I drop a metaphoric pin

piercing the elbow of the river’s great arm.

I’m trying to recall its uncertain name.

The Brazos, that’s it, I think,

is winding west of Sugar Land.

The moment that clouds appear,

I cannot see its artful coils, yet

know these vapors are the River in Exile

at sixty-five hundred feet.

A name should flow from lips to ears,

then ears to lips, then to ears again.

Recorded upon parchment, alone,

their truest memory is lost.

Names are appropriated by

tongues and pens of sons of mothers

from other lands, while 

the first names spoken are exiled:

Tonkonohono, Kanahatino

Nearly half a millennia ago a colonist declared:

“This is as Colorado, ruddy and red.

These are as the Arms of God, Brazos de Dios,”

then confused these on the map they made.

What I view below is the one

where wine-dark sediments flow. 

The canon erases the spoken names,

but the river declines any myth of order

whether on paper, deeds or with dams.

To survey a thing is not to know it.

For that one must walk alongside it,

trouble its wild and dangerous bends,

stir its swollen backwaters with oars,

learn its talent to spawn an oxbow lake

where you can rinse duckweed off your shoes.

You must notice the way its regiments 

spill into a quiet invasion of an orchard

while the greater of it ranks course on.

You must skim the topwater with 

your hands, poke at the fruitful floor, 

scry into its baffling depths for cues.

You must also tip the canoe,

lose your way often,

but still know you are home.

You must swim sometimes to safety,

grasping the ropey vines at its banks.

Vincent Hostak is a writer and media producer from Texas now living near the Front Range of Colorado south of Denver. His recently published poems are found in the journals Sonder Midwest and the Langdon Review of the Arts in Texas and as a contributor to the TPA. He writes & produces the podcast: Crossings-the Refugee Experience in America.