Current River

(June 2022. Hitchhiking cross country. David in Missouri showed me this cool hidden spot in a sandy cove by the beautiful Current River, and I ended up staying there all day. This is a classic Aidan poem, attempting to channel a moment in metaphysics and phenomenology, exploring language and point of view while simultaneously trying to show that everything touches, in dialogue with Whitman and Emerson. It’s lucky I wrote this, because my first ride the next day was from a very interesting woman with a purple gun who believed strongly in angels and demons everywhere; reading her this poem proved to her that I was an angel, and I was therefore safe.)

Current River

I am here the shore present
Watching you remembering
Four joyous southerners just north of 36* 30
Floating down the river
Water drying in my hair my memory of
My immense moment immersed in the same different water
Underwater they float over currently
In tubes, with beers.

(The dryness of the white page
The drying of wet memory like black ink
The way these words share worlds
And how it felt) and how we feel together, submerged,
Currently, underwater, crystal clear
Green deepening into deep light blue you can blink into,
Our eyes completely contiguous
With the water the world and lens of the world
Bluegreen and shimmering with beams of light

/You must habit yourself to the dazzle of the light
And of every moment of your life/

Individualized in the striking of the surface
Infinite straight streams of light shining
Through the new medium blessing the bluing
Current River this moment we are in it
Made of light looking now from an angle

/The thousand-eyed light of the present/

An angelic vision flowing with the Current’s current
Floating, paddling occasionally with strength to spare,
Capable of spanning this river however I desire,
I desire now to break the surface
And refract this body in the new air
And witness the thousand-diamond dazzle
Of sunlight glancing off the water’s topography
To gaze directly into my clean wide eyes.