The lawyer speaks of rivers.

AuthorStefancic, Jean
PositionPoem

THE LAWYER SPEAKS OF RIVERS I waited, like the others, wondering what he would say. And then, he spoke of rivers! He spoke, not of the father of waters, the great Mississippi dividing the country in two, but of the mother of Eastern waters, discovered by Verrazano and bearing Hudson's name. A mistaken passage to the northwest, connected upward to the Indian sky by a lake called Tear of the Clouds. And reaching inland, fed by spillways, thundering falls, past the Mohawk and Erie Canal, to the Great Lakes and seaway of Saint Lawrence, inward to the middle of the continent. Some small stream. He spoke of a river, and I, not knowing, listened. He spoke of a river: estuary, tidal, fresh, and salt, spawning hundreds of species of fish, a Noah's ark of the ichthyan world. I did not know that carp are monster children of glittering goldfish planted one hundred fifty years ago by Chinese settlers. I did not know that striped bass in West Coast streams descend from Hudson River ancestors transplanted, after gold silt stirred up by the panners caused an indigenous disaster, killing all the salmon. I could only recall from childhood's early days news bulletins from Hyde Park, and Rip van Winkle mixed up in it too. And once I saw the New Jersey Palisades from the expressway past Bear Mountain. And many years later I recognized the Northeast forest in...

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