My nearly 90-year-old mother road trips to Montana
By Heidi Seaborn
~inspired by Natasha Trethewey’s “Elegy” where rivers slough beneath the bank, round the stones, eddy in the slow run home— an alluvial fan of sediment and sentiment. My mother needed to say goodbye to the rivers—Bitterroot, Yellowstone, Flathead, Blackfoot, Bighorn, Gallatin— where her fly once teased the brown and cutthroat, once cast into the light of my father. Morning mist sifting off the meadows like steam rising from the coffee brewed over their camp stove. Wading hip-deep in the currents, their lines whipping through the weather— whatever that day offered. Catching a silver glimmer then releasing, as if each fish was a child held for the instant. If I was there, it was as a trout— a fluorescence in motion. The stream coursing, coursing past. A river seeks weakness, the unrooted— My mother had brought her fly rods, renewed her license. But the rivers were thick with memory and she is an old river—resisting, then changing direction.
Heidi Seaborn is Executive Editor of The Adroit Journal and winner of The Missouri Review Jeffrey E. Smith Editors Prize in Poetry. She’s the author of three award-winning books/chapbooks of poetry: An Insomniac’s Slumber Party with Marilyn Monroe, Give a Girl Chaos, and Bite Marks. She has recent work in Agni, Blackbird, Copper Nickel, Financial Times of London, Poetry Northwest, Plume, The Slowdown, and elsewhere. Heidi holds degrees from Stanford and NYU. See heidiseabornpoet.com.
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Really beautiful. It gets me wondering why we, as people, need to say goodbye, and what I need to say goodbye to..