River Lodge

for K.

You cannot go twice into the same house.
Magically appointed with a touch
of art as if from the world’s hand, it seems
to ferry onward and to grant safe passage
to a restless human who has made it home.
She is the key to a discovery
of the current of life in an abiding wildness.
If a boat were a simple small palace
of several rooms, decked out at different levels
with the craft of hands from West and East, not least
a few bird-sculptures of her own, catching
the instruments of rest and flight in a hubbub
of river-exchange, chipped out on the bank-garden …
the palace is of a river’s royalty.