River Lust @riverlust-blog - Tumblr Blog

“The river and everything I remembered about it became a possession to me, a private possession, as nothing in my life ever had. Now it ran nowhere but in my head, but there it ran as though immortally. I could feel it--I can feel it--on different places of my body. It pleases me in some curious way that the river does not exist, and that I have it. In me it still is, and will be until I die, green rocky, deep, fast, slow, and beautiful beyond reality.”

James Dickey, from To the White Sea (Simon & Schuster, 2002)

#James Dickey #To the White Sea #river #memory #possession

Inside the river is there a river?— it could follow slow water the way the real current follows a stiller shore. And in your life the life that hurries could pass, and pass its open neighbor the earth, and its shore the sky. To be here, and always to find places in the current, the dreams the river has—surely we bubbles ought to tell about it?

Listen: One of the rooms the river has after its bridge and its bend in the mountains is a place waiting for the sun every afternoon, when the sun dwells at a slant under a log and finds that little yellow room and a waterbug trying to learn circles but never making one its shadow approves. Miles later the river tries to recall that dream, turning with all of its twisting self that found gravel and found it good.

Just before the ocean that river turns on its back and side and slowly invites the world and the air and the sky, trying to give away everything, everything.

William Stafford, “Mother Talking in the Porch Swing,” Don’t Leave Hungry: Fifty Years of Southern Poetry Review, ed. James Smith (University of Arkansas Press, 2009)

#William Stafford #Mother Talking in the Porch Swing #Don't Leave Hungry #river poetry

There is a river above the river, like the dreaming or the breathing of the river. Only as the sun rises over the cedars can you see the spirit river flowing slowly, but listen as you will, you will not hear it.

Ursula K. Le Guin, from “From ‘McKenzie Voices,’” Finding My Elegy: New and Selected Poems, 1960-2010 (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2012)

#Ursula K Le Guin #From McKenzie Voices #Finding My Elegy #river poem #memory

bernoko

riverlust-blog

Bernard Creely, Down To The River, 2016

#Bernard Creely #river photography #black and white

And yet somewhere below the light bevel of its watercourse an undercurrent quarries through acres of sand, gouging out a barge road in mute, invisible, in- cessant bursts, which is how we imagine conscience works, rivering the mind until the mind’s capacities are shaped by it.

Sherod Santos, section II of “Wing Dike at Low Water,” The Pilot Star Elegies (W. W. Norton & Co., 1999)

#Sherod Santos #Wing Dike at Low Water #The Pilot Star Elegies #river poetry

Tonight the river is at work dissolving, solving over and over the riddle of its loosening. I want to know how to hear it, and what it might teach me:

Davis McComb, from “The River and Under the River,” Ultima Thule (Yale University Press, 2000)

#Davis McComb #The River and Under the River #Ultima Thule #river poetry #listen #learn

metaphorformetaphor

Again we look beyond the words, the moment. We look at the river, the square, the sleeping summer.

Marguerite Duras, from Emily L. transl. by Barbara Bray (Pantheon Books, 1987)

#Marguerite Duras #Emily L #words #moment #river #summer #expression

Jack Barnosky, River 2, 2015

#Jack Barnosky #River 2 #photography #landscape #river #memory

withnailrules

riverlust-blog

William Stanley Haseltine, Bruges, 1877

#William Stanley Haseltine #Bruges #canal #river art #landscape painting

“At times, it feels as if the past is very near. On certain evenings, when the sun has dropped and the air is turning blue, when barn owls float above the meadow grass and a pared-down moon breaches the treeline, a mist will sometimes lift from the surface of the river. It is then that the strangeness of water becomes apparent. The earth hoards its treasures and what is buried there remains until it’s disinterred by spade or plough, but a river is more shifty, relinquishing its possessions haphazardly and without regard to the landlocked chronology historians hold so dear. A history compiled by way of water is by its nature quick and fluid, full of submerged life and capable, as I would discover, of flooding unexpectedly into the present.”

Olivia Laing, from To the River: A Journey Beneath the Surface (Canongate Books, 2011)

#Olivia Laing #To the River #imagery #prose #past #present #river

like the river’s quiet passage from one place to another that is always going-on and always going-on must be so ancient a feeling it is the thing divine the word was caused to be—an it rises in the air and moves across the land devouring devouring and devouring.

Steve Scafidi, closing lines to “The Way the Days Pass One after Another,” The Cabinetmaker’s Widow: Poems (Louisiana State University Press, 2014)

#Steve Scafidi #The Way the Days Pass One after Another #The Cabinetmaker's Widow #river #going-on

[L]ike all narratives, the river flows left-to-right, and the willow bank is open to the sky.

Karl Kirchwey, from “Jump,” At the Palace of Jove: Poems (G. P. Putnam’s Sons, 2002)

#Karl Kirchwey #Jump #At the Palace of Jove #river #landscape #memory #narrative

alittletornandfrayed

My days in the wilderness will live with me always. Everything there was so alive and familiar. It’s wonderful how nature is a part of us. The sun shines not on us, but in us. The rivers flow not past, but through us.

John Muir

#John Muir #wilderness #quotation #rivers

alittletornandfrayed

riverlust-blog

alittletornandfrayed

Now that is a grasshopper - protein for trout!

Fly fishing the Truckee River, Nevada, Trophy Section. Fall 2013.

#Truckee River #Nevada #fly fishing #alittletornandfrayed

The river does what words would love, Keeping its appearance By insisting on disappearance; Its only life surrendered To the event of pilgrimage, Carrying the origin to the end, Seldom pushing or straining, Keeping itself to itself Everywhere all along its flow, At one with its sinuous mind, An utter rhythm, never awkward, It continues to swirl Through all unlikeness, With elegance: A ceaseless traverse of presence Soothing on each side The stilled fields, Sounding out its journey, Raising up a buried music Where the silence of time Becomes almost audible.

John O'Donohue, from "In Praise of Water," Four Elements: Reflections on Nature (Harmony Books, 2010)

“Dreaming beside the river, I gave my imagination to the water, the green, clear water, the water that makes the meadow green. I can’t sit beside a brook without falling into a deep reverie, without seeing once again my happiness . . . The stream doesn’t have to be ours; the water doesn’t have to be ours. The anonymous water knows all my secrets. And the same memory issues from every spring.”

Gaston Bachelard, from L'eau et les rêves (Water and Dreams) (Pegasus, 1983)

#Gaston Bachelard #river prose #Water and Dreams #L'eau et les rêves

memoryslandscape-deactivated202

When all these that were shimmer, shadow, or gloss Are far from here, shall I remember then The river as a world wide as wonder That flows, entwines continuous change with loss? Having once been, shall I be once again Aware of earth’s both excellence and plunder?

Catherine Breese Davis, closing lines to “A Small River in Iowa and the Wide World,” Memorious (no. 23, December 2014)

#Catherine Breese Davis #A Small River in Iowa and the Wide World #river poetry

Trending Blogs

Recently Viewed Blogs

River Lust