  I've been spending a lot of time reading poetry lately. I have no idea why; it's just something that I'm really into right now. There is a great literary magazine called Calyx , with short stories and poetry written by women. Now usually, I'm not game for poetry that over-emphasis breasts and uses the womb as a metaphor several times in the same poem. But Calyx is&nbsp;not that kind of work, thank god. &nbsp; I'm posting my favorite poem from Calyx as a form of a post. Yeah, I know I'm being cheap and not writing about my life, the life that this blog is suppose to chronicle.
But things are both painfully stereotypical and painfully complicated to actually write about. &nbsp; IF I CALLED YOU RIVER Alison Townsend &nbsp; If I called you river and straddled the silky muscles of your passing. &nbsp; If you called me river and pulled me to you, swimming in the silky, silver pull of my legs. &nbsp; If I wove myself around you, sweet and sinuous as water itself, as the call of the redwing floating toward you now from the cattails. &nbsp; If you slid beside me, sleek and playful as the otter careening down his muddy ride in one long breath before he caresses the water. &nbsp; If I caressed you back, reflecting sunlight, reflecting wingspan of hovering red-tailed hawk reflecting the tenderness with which light is received always by water. &nbsp; If you were water entering water. &nbsp; If we flowed that way for a long time, distinct but inseparable, the glinting flecks of silica from your sediments mixing with the sun-sparked mica of mine.
&nbsp; If the spring rains came, pushing us hard and fast, from our home in the mountains. &nbsp; If I had known high water and times of flood, the edge of me lapping, leaving a birth-scar along a line of rain-drenched trees. &nbsp; If you had known those times too, your calm surface churned into a wall of water pulled, root to stem, stem to leaf, leaf to air where it balances for a moment, quivers, and falling, begins again.
&nbsp; If I was a river you had never seen but had dreamed of forever. &nbsp; If you were a river I could taste in my sleep. &nbsp; If even in winter we kept moving together, meeting in secret beneath our glassy quilt. &nbsp; If everything is season and snowmelt. &nbsp; If everything is release and return, the peppered foam of frog spawn and the salmon's muscular silver thrust. &nbsp; If I called you river. If you called me river. If the river knew anything more than this sweet braiding and undoing of water, that feeds everything and yearns for everything and is, in its rushing, everything the river can know. &nbsp; If the river knew. If river were ever possible to contain. If the heart were, and the blood, and the body, this human urge to name things by things other than what they are.
&nbsp; I name you river. I name myself river. I name what we are together river carving a channel between the grassy banks, leading us &nbsp; to the open mouth, the salty swallow, the deep, green voice of the sea that cries out so far within us I cannot tell if it is you who cries out or me.&nbsp; &nbsp; Real post sometime... in the future. Maybe sooner. But probably later. &nbsp; Affectionately... Anna 
