Oxbows - Shakespeare's Monkeys

Oxbows

Mr Macllwaine explained it in geography
with blackboard diagrams and a metre-long ruler.
How the low-lying river would meander
like our attention, flowing faster at the concave bend,
under-cutting, eroding, while deposition layered
mud and silt and sand at the slow flowing convex bend.
How, over time, the loop would close in
as outer bends gouged towards collision,
till currents met and merged, re-routing the river.

After floods and the seeded reclaim of rushes,
sedge and grass, the trapped cut-off stagnated
in U-shaped isolation; a vast discarded yoke
unhitched from river-ox and plough; a lost water-bow
curving through under-growth and over-growth.

That we stumble across one June heat,
quitting the fishless river, too sun-lit
for salmon or trout to mouth our futile baits;
but here in the scorched flood-plain’s outback,
the billabong hummed with damsels and dragonflies
wing-clicking over daggers of reed-blades,
water-choking stonewort and pondweed.
Edging to verges, we dropped our hooked worms
through gaps in tangles, plummeting ghost-pools,
to roach and rudd that broke to our amazement,
red-finned and glistening forth from muddy bed -
washed in by winter floods, they out-stayed
the migrant eels and bill-spearing herons,
flashing like memories through the oxbow's gloom.

We've moved by many oxbows since then:
each episode, each person in life
cut a curve through us, bending back on time,
till we lost them or they lost us.
Somewhere low-lying in distant meadows
they hide away in weedy dis-used channels,
once a part of us, now removed.
When memory floods they fill again -
our rivers spill to trace their vanished flows.