Caroline Crumpacker
Viewer Discretion and Young Child
Darling this story begins al segno
following the river
to middle expressionism and then to the moral order
of families as the dissolving centerpiece of a predisposition
for nostalgia.Ach Du Lieber…
This to say she understands water individually
not collectively.
Physicality is easier than abstraction
even at her age.The river contradicts the bath.
The little inflatable pool a desolate thing.She says warrr…
We say Yes yes water.Everyone here owes a debt to the River.
Without knowing why.We would pave it over if we could.
The hose unleashes a torrent.
She says Stop warr. I say the evening peeling a bit at the corners
like the old landscape drama it is. I had cachet once in choices.
And a butterfly enters the conversation as the lost soul
of romantic painting.Before the bridges imagine its necessity.
Function is the rending.Now a thriving business in dislocation.
Small servings of beauty sold in the name of geographic privilege.
Sweet-smelling summer funk.
The railroad straddles the river and takes us
as the song says up up up.
Up-river the family thrives like the green reeds
of a New Orleans Gothic.Families are form not function.
Where the corn and lilies manipulate.
Where the bookstore has a section called “River”.
Where the words are,
a new place is created.The water is sugar tea in August.
I lie sweating in bed at mid-day thinking this is my life.
And outside a drumbreat of ruination
and celebration..We go walking and she says beach
No no, — quay.The remaining imperative, love.
