In his haibun titled “The river rolls over,” David Ward presents nature as a dreamer: “…the river rolled over in its green June sleep and began to dream.” While nature is the traditional topic of the haibun and haiku, Ward also emphasizes a speculative sense of intertextuality between nature and the speaker. The speaker’s name, a word “revealed,” becomes a catalyst for “regard” in “weird water.” —Court Harler
The teenager fishing on shore recognized me just as he reeled in a bluegill and, in calling out (my boy once put a bicycle together with him) to me, revealed my name to the fish who, being too small and polluted to eat, he released. The fish carried my name to the river and the river rolled over in its green June sleep and began to dream.
In the dream, the river flowed backwards, from Lake Erie inland. This was mightily uncomfortable for the river, who, in the dream, began to take on a whole new character, flowing west with the burden of new, weird water, and when my name dropped hookish from the fish’s lips and settled into the riverbed there came, from the depths of that dream, a moment of regard—
in my canoe, all the eyes
of duckweed bedeck
the oars, the gunwale, my shoe—
DAVID WARD is a lecturer at the University of Michigan, where he has taught writing in a variety of genres for the last fifteen years. He has had poetry published in Black Warrior Review and is a co-founding editor of the poetry and craft journal Public School Poetry.
Featured image by Michael Niessl, courtesy of Unsplash.
Flash the Court 