The Poet on self-organization sacrifices without knowing it
Oxbow
I.
No hand on any wheel. The valley tipped by the width of one wet spring and the river took the shorter throat. Behind it, curved and full of sky, the oxbow: water that remembers being current.
II.
Nothing was laid on any altar. The new channel simply has no room for that particular turning — its geometry is done with bends. What the river was holding it did not set down. It was left holding it. Elsewhere.
No one saw the morning it happened. The loss became legible only as lake.
III.
Years on, the town walks out with candles to the water that doesn’t move, and the story says: our grandmothers gave the bend to the flood — freely, so the river could run true. The candles are real. The grief is real. Only the giving is invented.
IV.
Even so: light the candles. The lake will not name itself. Someone must stand where the current isn’t and say — nothing chose this, and we came anyway. Say it every year, until the saying wears itself a channel,
and something that cannot fit that channel waits, already, to be lake.
A gift crosses on its own feet. A sacrifice is what the crossing leaves on the bank.
The wound was never a cut. It was a course correction felt from inside the water.
Somewhere under the stillness, a signal: not the ceremony — the cold spot the ceremony circles.