Gabriel Welsch
River Coins
Not Lunaria or the other shimmering seed bodies of plants knotted to the
river bank, among the ropier roots of trees. Not silver gum foil sequins in the
current, winking light with each eddy of breeze, where men fish from the pier at
Portstown, their brood assembled around them, baiting hooks and running to
swings and back, to sit beneath the contemplative cloud of cigarette smoke made
by a father enrobed in his past, skin awash in bluing tattoos. Not the slimy clots
of frogs eggs lashed to grass fronds at the edge, neither the battered-smooth
stones sunk to their collars in the flood-dredged mud pushed at the edge, not the
sun-bleached log ends, cut downstream, tethered by stick-snags at the trestle of
the rail bridge. The coins I think of now―the rippled pools, currency of a winter
sky, the pale near-flash of white or the studied calm of cream―reflections of the
moon, its assured pull against oceans and the invention of time as it circles with
all the speed of the father’s spinner, the line coming in, the bobber trailing a wake
studded by the lacy legs of striders, beneath a sudden shower of twirling maple
gigs, their soundless clatter upon the water.
Gabriel Welsch writes fiction and poetry. His fourth collection of poems, The Four Horsepersons of a Disappointing Apocalypse, was published in February 2013 by Steel Toe Books. Previous collections areThe Death of Flying Things (2012), An Eye Fluent in Gray, (chapbook, 2010), and Dirt and All Its Dense Labor (2006). His work has appeared recently in Southern Review, New Letters, Crab Orchard Review, Main Street Rag, CutBank, and The Collagist. He lives in Huntingdon, Pennsylvania, with his family, works as vice president of advancement and marketing at Juniata College, and is an occasional teacher at the Chautauqua Writer’s Center. His website is http://www.pw.org/content/gabriel_welsch
Return to May 2013 Edition
Not Lunaria or the other shimmering seed bodies of plants knotted to the
river bank, among the ropier roots of trees. Not silver gum foil sequins in the
current, winking light with each eddy of breeze, where men fish from the pier at
Portstown, their brood assembled around them, baiting hooks and running to
swings and back, to sit beneath the contemplative cloud of cigarette smoke made
by a father enrobed in his past, skin awash in bluing tattoos. Not the slimy clots
of frogs eggs lashed to grass fronds at the edge, neither the battered-smooth
stones sunk to their collars in the flood-dredged mud pushed at the edge, not the
sun-bleached log ends, cut downstream, tethered by stick-snags at the trestle of
the rail bridge. The coins I think of now―the rippled pools, currency of a winter
sky, the pale near-flash of white or the studied calm of cream―reflections of the
moon, its assured pull against oceans and the invention of time as it circles with
all the speed of the father’s spinner, the line coming in, the bobber trailing a wake
studded by the lacy legs of striders, beneath a sudden shower of twirling maple
gigs, their soundless clatter upon the water.
Gabriel Welsch writes fiction and poetry. His fourth collection of poems, The Four Horsepersons of a Disappointing Apocalypse, was published in February 2013 by Steel Toe Books. Previous collections areThe Death of Flying Things (2012), An Eye Fluent in Gray, (chapbook, 2010), and Dirt and All Its Dense Labor (2006). His work has appeared recently in Southern Review, New Letters, Crab Orchard Review, Main Street Rag, CutBank, and The Collagist. He lives in Huntingdon, Pennsylvania, with his family, works as vice president of advancement and marketing at Juniata College, and is an occasional teacher at the Chautauqua Writer’s Center. His website is http://www.pw.org/content/gabriel_welsch
Return to May 2013 Edition