Rivers

Rivers are arteries of color running through a wild land.
Dusk turns Fox’s river into a flame,
a turbulence of dream songs rushing into darkness
where rivers flow into the sea
and seas empty into a sky filled with a bright scape of stars
leaping in arcs of picaresque constellations.
All night long Fox stalks shadows above the river’s mercurial gleam.
As day breaks she flees her arterial world through the hues of sunrise—
paintings on rock gardens, frescos on gray cliffs.
Polished soft Fox is the color of agates.
Rivers rake an untamed heart that beats in rhythm to its shifting song,
like the shining moon caught in whirling foam
like a shimmering fox running home.





-P.V. Beck

P.V. Beck writes from the mountains of northern New Mexico. Her most recent poems which explore the inner and outer worlds of a Gray fox are published in various magazines. She has a Ph.D. in the History of Consciousness; her research and essays on ecology and consciousness, the fool, ritual clowning, and language have appeared in anthologies and journals. She is the author of The Sacred: Ways of Knowledge, Sources of Life, a comprehensive study of North American indigenous cultures and epistemologies; the author of the young adult girls’ basketball novel, Sweet Turnaround J; and the editor of a volume of Maeve Butler’s poems, The Mighty Branches of the Heart. She was awarded a National Endowment Folk Arts grant for the book and museum exhibit, Oremos, Oremos: New Mexican Midwinter Masquerades which documented the coded performances and dramas of villagers in northern New Mexico. Her recent album of tunes, The Wild Path: Twelve Waltzes and a Jig, is at bandcamp.com and streaming. She works in her community to restore the local watershed and to promote healthy eco-systems for various creatures who live in or migrate through the mountain valley.