Two Poems

by ELLEN KAUFMAN

I. Bank Story

The river needed more room

and so it took a room

for itself along the water’s edge,

lolled porch-side in the downpour,

came up against the curved road

with its own proposal drowning out

theirs, until the river was a road

and the road a river

spreading through windows

like a liquid view, trees wavering 

on the surface amid clouds

and, after all, the dilatory sun 

drying the paper bedrooms and 

the rusted kitchen until, finally,

the crooked house returned

and the river, again homeless,

was back in its old place between 

the banks, washing itself on rocks.

II. Algae

A pond dies of too much life.

Of warmth, of light. 

What shouldn’t kill it 

does. Reflected trees

root and bloom; once real 

they can’t just come and go.

Our arms and faces ride

the slime forest, its food

our effluence, our past.

We would prefer a world without us

to dip our bodies in.

ELLEN KAUFMAN's collection, House Music, is forthcoming from Able Muse Press. A poem from that manuscript won the Southwest Review's Morton Marr Poetry Prize in 2012. She was a MacDowell Fellow in 2009.