He said that he couldn’t tell us why,
exactly, but he wanted to live out
the rest of his life by flowing water,
and he’d found a small rock house
from the 1880s that he could afford,
a short walk from the Mississippi
in a little town in Iowa. Cut limestone,
clustered with ancient fossil shells,
windows in deep cool wells, with sills
where you could set the red begonias
he could remember from childhood.
And along the river was a park
with benches where old men could sit
watching the boats push rusty barges
into the locks, and when there weren’t
barges to look at, there would be eddies
out on the surface, catching the light,
circling and circling until they were gone.
You’ve seen them, he said, like something
you’ll never, ever know the reason for,
being swept away. Just once, he said,
he wanted his own bed under a window
with begonias in blossom on the sill,
and before nodding off to take a deep breath
of the river, bait buckets and fish scales
sweeping along through the night,
and to be able to hear the soft ripples
from moonstruck eddies coming to shore
as if looking for someone, lapping the sides
of the beat-up, leaky fishing boats
hauled up on the mud, left forgotten,
part in and part out of the water.