I\u2019d been sitting by the river all afternoon
and now the sun was going down and Venus
shone on the horizon. I\u2019d been sitting
to watch how the water swirled into braids <\/p>\n\n\n\n
and swirled out again. I was watching
a leaf ride the river until, drawn into
sluggish water near the bank, it rested.
Evening fell but the full moon made
moving water sparkle. <\/p>\n\n\n\n
Quite late a trail took me up the long bank
and across a rough meadow home. But before
I climbed the porch steps I stopped and listened
to distant water and a single owl. <\/p>\n\n\n\n
Above me Orion was still in place,
so I went in to sleep in a room whose floor
was earth and whose ceiling was moonlight. <\/p>\n\n\n\n
All night as I slept, in generous swirls
the river pursued its intricate dance,
as if it were still learning. <\/p>\n\n\n\n
\u2014Bert Stern H\u201962 <\/p>\n\n\n\n
Reprinted from <\/em>What I Got for a Dollar: Poems by Bert Stern, Grid Books, used by permission. <\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n BERT STERN <\/strong>is Milligan Professor of English Emeritus at Wabash and for 15 years taught Changing Lives Through Literature to men and women on probation. His first essay for WM <\/em>was \u201cBeing Here,\u201d Winter 2005.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" I\u2019d been sitting by the river all afternoon and now the sun was going down and Venus shone on the horizon. I\u2019d been sitting to watch how the water swirled into braids and swirled out […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":16,"featured_media":4966,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[11,8,1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-4964","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-featured-videos","category-features","category-uncategorized"],"w_featured_image_url":"https:\/\/blog.wabash.edu\/magazine\/wp-content\/uploads\/sites\/15\/2020\/01\/tafreshi_mg_3456pc2s.jpg","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.wabash.edu\/magazine\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4964","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.wabash.edu\/magazine\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.wabash.edu\/magazine\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.wabash.edu\/magazine\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/16"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.wabash.edu\/magazine\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=4964"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/blog.wabash.edu\/magazine\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4964\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":4965,"href":"https:\/\/blog.wabash.edu\/magazine\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4964\/revisions\/4965"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.wabash.edu\/magazine\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/4966"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.wabash.edu\/magazine\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=4964"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.wabash.edu\/magazine\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=4964"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.wabash.edu\/magazine\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=4964"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}