60 for 60: Just Yesterday

By Zachary Erickson

I’ve never gone swimming in a river (I’m not sure I’ve ever encountered a river considered clean enough to swim in), but I’ll never forget William Blake’s words in “The Chimney Sweeper“: “And wash in a river and shine in the Sun.” I doubt that, in Blake’s lifetime, anyone would have much fancied the Thames as a purificatory bath; but that does not stop the imagination from portraying it thus. I don’t think I can avoid rivers in my poetry, either, whether I’ll ever swim in one or not.

“Just Yesterday,” written by Mark Bibbins and published in Columbia Journal‘s thirty-fourth issue, seems to be about many things: childhood adventure, prohibitions, and dreams taking flesh. The poem returns more than once to the backbone-image of a river, and for good reason. A river cannot be censored.

Just Yesterday

Mark Bibbins

Before prayer in the schools we had the Crusades
and we cleaned out the stock-pot once a year.

Virtually everything we ate induced narcosis,
a condition we often confused with god.

Some told of a river than ran outside the walls
of the city and of how it moved to avoid their touch,

a giant serpent twisting forever away. If it wasn't the devil
it was the work of the devil like everything else we wanted.

Remorse held us together until we died young
and most of us never realized that we were mammals—

indeed we were suspicious of birds but rats, well, rats
we found charming, with their eyes so full

their need for warmth like our own. We also
wanted love to suffice. Flies that collected on the lesions

of the dying: angels one and all: no one could be too careful.
It seemed a flood was forever rinsing ideas from my tongue

so I said nothing or spoke louder, I was always drowning.
I couldn't have changed anything.

At night there was the alchemist
and I loved him but I could not save him.

Once I dreamt of electricity. Was this the river,
the one that altered its course like a wounded thing?

We had no trees, only sticks.
Huge gears turned in the sky.