River of Blood

A Sonnet

This is a poem I wrote many years ago—practicing in the form of the sonnet.

In reading this poem it might be helpful to think of the body’s arteries as rivers of blood, as suggested by the image above. A few other points: Dante imagines those damned for violence as wallowing in a river of boiling blood; and to “flake out” a climbing rope is to untangle it by casting it from one hand through the other into loose loops on the ground.

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                                   River of Blood

"The line separating good and evil passes not through states, nor between classes, nor between political parties either - but right through every human heart." - Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn
 
                You wouldn’t call this a river though it weaves
                 its turning way uncertain as it goes
                 and bends like flakes of rope flung in oxbows.
                 It’s not a river even though it leaves
                 a boundary line that edges Eden, Eve’s
                 lost happiness and home. And though it flows
                 like water, those are hardly banks below
                 that intermittent canopy of trees.
                 Once in time it climbed and then grew cold.
                 It clots, congeals, and rusts—or pushes through 
                 the veins enmeshing bodies made for other worlds
                 now broken like the backs of prison crews.
                 It’s not a river.  Rivers don’t go old
                 and limp like aching limbs and hearts do.