It's Still Life

Liturgy for the Confluence of All Things
(for Lyon, where the rivers join and the age does not)

I. The Place Where Waters Meet

Here the Saône loosens its dark body
into the clearer Rhône.

No treaty.
No argument.
Brown water takes green.
Green water takes brown.

They braid,
shoulder to shoulder,
and go on.

Brigid watches the seam
where difference disappears.

Peace, she thinks, might look like this
if peace were made of rivers.

But water has no pride.
No fists.
No banners.

Water receives water.
We are not rivers.

II. The Hum

Between city and confluence
the mosquitoes rise.

A cloud of small engines,
thin wires whining
over skin.

They bite cheeks,
bite wrists,
the softness of the mouth.

Brigid slaps her neck.

Blood salts her tongue,
copper,
river-metal.

The taste of staying alive
in a century
that taxes breath.

III. The Hills

The guns are quiet.
But the hills
are not.

Sound lingers in stone.
Moves through scrub
and limestone ribs.

What was shouted yesterday
returns today
as echo.

Downriver
the insects carry it,
wing to wing.

Enough.

The word loosens
from hill to hill
until it reaches water.

IV. The Weight

They stand where the rivers join.

Knowledge settles
the way silt settles.

Heavy.
Patient.

Revolts rise.
Revolts fall.

Cities burn,
then open their markets
the next morning.

This understanding
drops into Brigid
like a stone in deep water.

Felreil says nothing.
His silence carries it.

V. The Other Thought

Still—
the rivers continue.

Dark accepts clear.
Clear accepts dark.

Neither vanishes.

Brigid watches
the long braid of water
pull south.

Perhaps joining
is not surrender.
Perhaps it is method—

the way weather travels
without asking permission.

VI. Confluence

See the Saône,
thick with fields and secrets.

See the Rhône,
cold and impatient.

See the seam
where neither conquers.

Hear the mosquitoes,
the far cathedral bells,
the hills
remembering gunfire.

And watch the two exiles
standing where waters braid.

They study the rivers
as if the future
might already be moving there.

Provence is not escape.
It is weather,
and the weather
is already on its way.