Deda is temporarily off line for a while, but asked me to send his love and best wishes to anyone who might have missed him. He also asked me to re-post this poem. I hope you like it as much as I do.
Angel 
THE RIVER
This is the river, flowing onward, watermoments,
Eagles dive for shiny fish (I love to tell about the eagles!),
Overflowing its banks, drowning brown grass into mud.
The French deserters came up this way and traded
with the Choctaw, "on this here bluff" they say,
Though nobody can prove it.
This is the river the tornado jumped over and killed more.
This is the river that jumped its banks in '79
and drowned neighborhoods, leaving
water moccasins dangling in their chandeliers.
This is the river that made the lake
that almost became my reverse mother by drowning me.
This is the river, they want to put an amusement park.
This is the river will take it all away someday, to the sea,
Carrying with it all joys and sorrows,
Washing dog bones and basketball trophies down with its
eddies of brown chocolate milkwater currents.
This is the river will take it all down or will die trying,
The river of time, of mud, of futile effort, of dreams, of death.
This is the river has the same name as a river in China
except it sounds different in Chinese,
Pearl, we call it.
Why did they name it that?
It's not white, and only slightly irridescent.
It's not pure,
it washes muddy fields
and empties stagnant swamps and bayous.
This is the river they call Pearl for no reason.
When I think of Pearl,
I think of the hideous stripmall and trailer park,
and mean cop conservative enclave (called Pearl),
across the river from tragically hip Jackson.
This is the river Janie and I played Tarzan and Jane except
I was wary of water I can't see through.
This is not the lovely Bayou Pierre (pron: By-Peer)
with its crystalline spring-fed count the minnows round your toes
river.
This is the: "What was that, that slithered across my foot?!"
or the "I don't like the look of that whirlpool!" or the
"How close are we to the treatment plant?"
This river made
one of the largest man-made lakes in North America,
the Ross Barnett reservoir, named after a racist pig governor
who tried to keep blacks out of Ole Miss.
(Ole Miss now has a legendary football team
because Ross Barnett
couldn't keep blacks from going to Ole Miss.)
This is an interesting place
if you get bored enough to take a closer look at it.
This river has uncovered new layers for me.
That shoe floating by-
That belonged to a woman who was blown up when the armory
exploded mysteriously, during "the war".
The river suddenly seems more of a reddish brown.
There's blood in this water.
Choctaw, Chickasaw, Natchez.
Confederate, Union.
Lots of African blood might explain the brown like the old
racist pig myth about swimming pools.
Ghostly apparitions appear if you stare at the water in moonlight.
I once saw a coiling quicksilver serpent writhing in the
lunar reflection on the river's surface,
swirling, looping moebius strip coiling around and swallowing itself over and over like Ourouboros.
And so it swallows time in human debris,
This channel from the Graceland hills around Tupelo
across the antediluvial floodplain to the Gulf of Mexico
by way of the industrialized, hurricane tortured coast
carrying with it "all the best laid plans" in the forms of
beer cozies, hubcaps, rabbitears, rotten couches,
so many lives, so much sweat, so much rain.
This is the river that will take me home one day.
I'd better get to know it,
hear its song,
Its long, lonely mantra of perpetual cycles
of flood and storm and ice and drought
This is the mother of all life
During dry seasons
it is green with algae
our eldest ancestor
parent of all terrestrial life
this river and that gulf and that ocean
are
the disseminator
and fertilizer of all Earthly life.
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