Like sky slung down from mountains in foaming water it rolls
Like mountain down it rolls in river through the blue drain of gravity
It breaks at its wrists, gathers at its waists, fattens the meadows,
swells in eddies and pools of lazy trout
It rolls on from the silver spine of the Divide, split at Cameron, peaked at
Diamond & Mahler, the Never Summers, Snowys, Rawah
It rolls on through canyon body, through glacier body gone, it rolls
and tumbles granitic time, the molten turn and thrash
It rolls on through release—the hands-thrown-open fields of alfalfa,
sorghum and wheat, it rolls on through ditches, arterial and flush
It rolls on like a forgotten friend, behind the armory, train tracks,
the fallen silo, crumbled dairy, the stacked up auto repair lot
It rolls on to Greeley, and 19th c. promises, rolls with laughing peals
through Manifest Destiny, “rain follow the plow,” “you just have
to dig for wood and water,” it rolls to the S. Platte,
and the longer roll on roll to the Missouri, the Mississippi
•
It rolls on through name body—Hinono-eino, Arapahoe, and
Mogwachi-núuchi, Ute—and far east Kiowa and Cheyenne
It rolls on through vanquished and massacred body, through Eaton and
Pitkin body, Larimer, Gilpin and Koenig body, it rolls on through
money and the nameless body of earth
Through forgotten names, unmarked graves, bleached cow skulls
behind the collapsed barn, it rolls on through barbwire,
child mortality, bad governors, wild roses and ore
It rolls on in fruit body—orchards of apples and peaches and plums,
It rolls on as sugar beet, sweat in its labor and sweet in its weight
It rolls on in oil, the silent sea, One that came before, was an After me
Like an open vein, like a sluiced giant, it rolls on through cottonwood
and willow body, through sage and rabbit bush, through grama
and bluestem, through drought and illusion, it rolls on
beyond us, the river flayed in moonlight
—
Matthew Cooperman is the author of, most recently, the atmosphere is not a perfume it is odorless (Free Verse Editions/Parlor Press, 2024) and Wonder About The, winner of the Halcyon Prize (Middle Creek, 2023) as well as NOS (disorder, not otherwise specified), with Aby Kaupang, (Futurepoem, 2018), Spool, winner of the New Measure Prize (Free Verse Editions/Parlor Press, 2016), and other books. His ninth book, Time, & Its Monument, is forthcoming from Station Hill Press. A Founding Editor of the exploratory prose journal Quarter After Eight, Cooperman is Co-Poetry Editor for Colorado Review, and Professor of English at Colorado State University. He lives in Fort Collins with his wife, the poet Aby Kaupang, and their children. More info at http://matthewcooperman.org
