Monongahela #10 from Monongahela Poems by Ward/Lewandowski

It’s night and the crickets are rhythmic and I’m
alone with the darkness. alone, poignant, imperishable.
I write as a kindred soul, as a once-lover and never, in the voice of the
river, the trees, the always-dying season.
If you could see this place. If you could hear my heart beating. This poem
brings you close to me, you’re sitting at the end of the bed. The dim yellow overhead
light’s on but we don’t speak in the light, only in the dark.
Oh, if I. Could sleepwalk naked to the river and fall in and
dissolve, disperse through it, become the river.
It has an Indian name that’s Greek somehow-Monongahela. Maybe it
seems Greek because it makes me think of a Cyclops, one silver
eye staring blindly into the night.
If. Before you turned out the light, you pulled a little antique
tin out of your pocket of something called “Cricket Balm” and
pressed your finger to my lips, shhh, don’t speak...massaged
the balm into my body, and I massaged it into
yours, until it made us one with the night.

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