I need to ask you something.

What happened back there,

in the moonlight, the fishing boat?

That wasn't you, was it?

Because for me, you were never truly was it?

Because for me, you were never truly about that.

Yes, I understand that your lifeblood is water, and water has changed just as much as it is death or life,

and all things must change. Yes, there is beauty and

finality in the mindless piece of the crawling and shittiness things that are left in the wake of

your high tides. But my eyes would glaze over when I heard Nana Glass speak of these things.

I would sit there in defiant silence, with my head bowed,

as I listened to the Catabasians recite those passages from our sacred texts,

the ones which I could not believe in with my whole heart,

which I could never whisper to myself in the cradle of moonlight,

because they were not you as I knew you. My sweet and dangerous river. Only some

fallible, all too human misinterpretation of what you ought to be.

For me, you are stillness, and you are fury.

Back in the Reform House, the supervisors would tell us to hold hands as we walk to school,

so we didn't lose ourselves in the city. And we'd scurry in a teetering line of black uniforms,

up through the city blocks of steel and glass. Am amidst the endless scaffolds and cranes in the cycling havoc of construction built on devastation.

The smug divinely branded placards overhead announcing what each new excavation was going to become, and how much it would cost to have a home there.

I would dream then about your waters rising to swallow all of this.

...