RICHARD LONG

As Close As Any Lovers Come Heat brings us to the river with a basket summer picnic of suicide wings and strawberries. Here the rapids of four lakes lack form - only beer cans, liquor bottles and condoms drift like water toys and jellyfish. You say The river burns like a back with too much sun. And stare at a front page picture of a boy at the brim of the Falls. No big deal to him, there, waving, and matters little underneath him a tourist boat waits to pick him up. Buffalo News 4 October 1992, E7. What Water Is To Rivers The ice face of your drowning shines, it fevers my winter heart and puts me adrift on the dank sweat raft of hallucination. Again I see you splashing in water so clear you can't tell up from down and say It doesn't matter anymore, what water is to rivers makes me ill - and under my fever is a frozen lake in which I've cut a hole for fishing. My hook bends with the dead weight of your skating carelessness. What's left of body heat will not thaw your blue body as I reel it in. Buffalo News 5 December 1993, E7.

Richard Long is Writing Coordinator at Daemen College in Buffalo, New York, where he edits A 2River View. The poems here are from his unpublished manuscript The Nightskull Rising.