Two Rivers

What the backhoe operator refers to as round rock,
and the mason calls aggregate, is actually
ancient gravel, burnished by the action of water
over a million years, buried in the silt of eroded
volcanic extrusions, and stripped raw by the river
to accommodate my sitting in its warmth, feet planted
in its cool grasp six inches deeper.
                                                           A blood red rock
lies beside a blue rock, shot with a white line of mica.
Aside from varied minerality, they are precise copies,
lying in their billions in a bar a quarter mile long,
flowing imperceptibly, roughly parallel to the river,
to descend beneath the field where the fence tips
over the undermined blackberries, one post
bobbing in and out of the current like a drinking bird.









A carpenter, Ted Jean writes, paints, plays tennis with lovely Amy Lee. His work appears in Beloit Poetry Journal, [PANK], DIAGRAM, Juked, Pear Noir!, Gargoyle, Magma (UK), dozens of other publications. He lives in Milwaukie, Oregon.

More art and writing from Ted Jean in Issue 2.1