Not until the darkness came
did I hear the river, the insistent
clear of it. All the bright day
I had listened to the ding
of the timer, the ring of the phone,
the whine of the boy and the sob
of the girl, the scrabble of kittens,
the turn of engines, the click
of my shoes, the printer’s gray hum.
And then, once the dishes were done
and the boy was asleep and
the girl was asleep and the phone
was off and the lights
were out and I lay in the patient
dark, I heard it, the changing flush
of the river’s rush, which surely
had been there all day, the river
doing what a river does—moving
over whatever stands in its path
and turning each obstacle into song.