Slow River

Poem No. 17

One of my artistic fascinations is time — the way it moves in tension with our perceptions and desires, the way a moment can stretch to infinity while a decade may pass in a blink.

Almost two decades have blinked since I wrote the first draft of today’s poem, but it captured one of those infinite moments, a fleeting instant I can still remember with crystalline clarity.

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Slow River

Hot tea in white mugs
and a conversation that meanders
like a slow river, back and forth

over the terrain of our lives.
And in this window
our reflections sit in their own café,

belonging wholly to the night
yet somehow immune to the rain,
where they share their own secret river

over phantom mugs of tea,
sometimes glancing at us 
with shy smiles 

and little nods of recognition.

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This poem, the 17th I ever wrote, may be the earliest of my poems I ever share publicly. (There are three other earlier candidates, but they all need another decade or so of editing. Check this space circa 2034. 🤣)

I think of my poems less as things I intentionally set out to create, and more as teachers that come along and offer a lesson to me while I’m working on them. This is certainly one of the first poems that really opened my heart to that idea. It taught me a lot about what I want to do with poetry, and I’ve been exploring the landscape it showed me ever since.

As such, I’ve been thinking about this poem a lot this past month, during Petra Hernandez’s February Poetry Adventure, and so I wanted to share it with you.

And if you would like to share it with someone else or on social media, I’d be honored and happen to have this handy image all ready for you:

Thanks for reading, it means the world to me,
~ A

P.S. — The February Poetry Adventure was so much fun! So much brave, wonderful poetry and support from the community here on Substack, and on Instagram, too. If you’re curious about the poems I posted, I have a week four roll-up you can browse. Most of the other participants were also posting poems under Petra’s Notes this month, so be sure to check those out as well.

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