Seven Sisters

Flies pester the duckweed while the river converses with both shores at the same time. An ex-lover on the opposite bank, and the creek divides our past. A narrow tongue reaches to the bay where, as a child, I thought surely the gods must inhabit this place.

His eyes pester me like the river flies and midges and gadflies. A lizard does late-summer push-ups on a tree stump. Spring is over, lizard. No time to mate. But hope springs eternal.

First day of fall, the water holds the promise of the seasons. When John Oliver Simon vacates the opposite beach, I climb down to a rock in the river, bubbles and duckweed strike the submerged rock like migrating islands.

There was a time when I caught fish barehanded in these same tributaries. In the backwaters and eddies, bent light and dark oscillations fragment the surface. Stone pool and moss, miniature vortices, like lost conversations.

Below the rock, the crawdads wait for the dead. Water skeeters jet against the current, streaming bubbles of air. Migratory birds pester the alders for hidden seeds. Midges circle the palpable air, loose spiderwebs luff and stray.

Last night, we sat up late discussing the names of plants. The ridge, Wildcat Ridge, a watershed between my past, my childhood, and my present state. Cattails like young trees, guard the umbrella plants. I tell Arthur Dawson, they are related to papyrus. As we write.

Our eyes connect to where I come from and where I live. Scorpio and Sagittarius wheeling and rising in the sky. I relearn the names of stars under a full moon readying for the eclipse, September 26, the last eclipse of the century. Fin de sicle, how do we know where we're going with our art? Did the Impressionists and postimpressionist have foreknowledge?

Later, seven women will swim nude in the reservoir above the creek. And we will admire each other's bodies in the sunlight, breasts floating like lily pads, nipples beckoning. Someone says I want to suck them all. And this water within us is also part of the cycle. Who is peeing in the pond?

We are the Seven Sisters, the Pleiades, who don't want to rush back to the daily grind, not yet. Ruth Gendler dries off. She is meeting a friend for Yom Kippur, but the water draws her back again in one last time. A baptism of sorts.