Poems by Brian Yapko

River of Angels

by Brian Yapko

From Canary Winter 2021-22

Brian, a former resident of Los Angeles, now lives between the Arroyo Hondo Watershed, the Rio Grande and the Sangre de Cristo Mountains, in Santa Fe, New Mexico.

you can’t get there from the old pueblo because
union station’s railyards block the way.

you snake around the tracks where a desiccated
caretaker leads you though chain link, down

a concrete embankment straitjacket to the ancient
river, that imprisoned, used up trickle which will

never know the ghats of the ganges, huck finn’s
raft, the lorelei, or chinese junks. here no old men

fish, no children swim, there are no flamingos,
no cormorants; no lotus blooms to chant of rebirth.

this river sings of discarded couches, rusty metal,
the glare of helicopters and bored film crews. but

when it rains the river remembers herself and her
currents sing of savage things, of zambezi floods,

cascades from yellowstone, niagara, the turbulence
of angel falls; and loud like cars racing on the 101.

imagine los angeles three hundred years ago, when
the land was wild and the river free, self-assured

coursing past the golden hills to the mighty pacific!
i fling off my shoes. i wade barefoot into the paved

riverbed to splash at the columbia-amazon-mekong
and my bare foot is impaled by the glass of a broken

bottle of wine cooler. i bleed angry red into the waters.
as i moan, i see the palm trees and skyscrapers like

guilty children pointing fingers upward instead
of at each other, blaming the sky and telling me

i shouldn’t have come.