This poem, by Matt Spillum, was a response poem to Black River Song (this recording by Rose Absolute from Some Kind of Mecca 1991). I love it. We have incorporated his reading of it into our set when we do this song. Listen while you read!

Matthew Spillum
11 July 2005

To the Source

How does it get this way? The water
oozing thick and muddy
past the old dock, rickety, half broken.
Somewhere its spirit is dead
or dying. It breathes only at the source.
She set her feet north, walking slow.

Sun-burnished summer day, her slow
liquid gait reminded the river men of cool water
from an old stone jug, a well, some pristine source.
Not the syrupy, smelly Big Muddy,
littered as it was with the dead,
the cast aside, the discarded and broken.

Cat-calls trailing, failing to leave her broken,
proud progress North steady and slow.
By night, she soothed the river dead,
placated the angry and restless. Those taken by water
drown in their own fear, souls muddy
and heavy, they cannot find their source.

She sang all night, a song whose source
was ancient when her ancestors learned it, broken
and afraid in a new land. On muddy
morning banks, she cooked channel cat, slow-
searing the river out, that foul water
the dark cradle of the dead.

The lock-and-dam operator had other answers; "Dead?
No, this river is life itself, the source
of commerce…money rides this water."
The doomed floodplainers agreed, among the broken
hulls of last years' homes, the crops' slow
greening of the plain's rich, muddy

loam…emeralds on black velvet, a muddied
mix of the living and the dead.
She marveled at their potent hopes on her slow
deliberate journey to the source,
saw the pale spirits, hope unbroken
midst primal, loving terror of the water.

The river coursing, slow, black and muddy
waters littered with the dead,
all crystal innocence at the source, its spell not yet broken.

He is an associate editor and contributer to the MetroState On line magazine - here.