Pigeon waltzes the trail on one foot and one little nub. Mallards and their escaped domestic kin and the bright, rasping horns of Canada geese in false spring, in glacier- turquoise water. Hundreds and hundreds of sharps sinking into the banks. Nests of clothes. Tents. Tarps. Broken trees helped down the slope with chainsaws. Water rainbow-slicked. The salt-spackled ground. The farmed transplants, the white- bread crumbs. Up the bank: courthouse, hockey arena, brutalist government tower, city museum, wind. Down here, the fork in the river. The sacred.
