A Return to Water

Briony Gylgayton

Eucalyptus scythes
taste bitter but I’ve gathered them before,
have held fistfuls of their brisk
bent edges out for my mother-
I’ve tried to say to her: their skin is feeble
it cracks into puzzle patterns, like the raised
strings I trace
on the backs of your hands in the evenings.
She took my hand, they flipped
down to wait again
in sour sand.
Along the sloping
river edge, we wavered forward
where bands of pungent bark
moored among reeds,
where minnows slid, and
fat water bugs
crept among the cat tails.

I bent to trap
their skipping limbs
between the loose weave of my
fingers, and
fell into the mud that spills from ducks’ open bills, the weeds
shook from geese’s wings, the sore rocks’ stink.
I rasped my palms on the riverbank.

In a murky panic,
I ate the river bottom. My cheeks cradled
the fronded legs of crayfish; my lips
held jelly eggs and loose eyes
shook from blinded worms.
I tangled myself among
the fleshy and bristling,
the soft and the slick.
I was crawling
under the storm of the earth.

Flipped from foul water. Felt
the flip, saw her hands. Felt
only the rough
ribs of eucalyptus leaves
between our wet and clasping fingers.