Today the river runs green, like the leaves of the trees that line the shore, soldiers standing at rest. In the bright sunlight, when you squint to focus on some distant object, the river and the shore are indistinguishable. Sparkles reflect from the surface of the water and you can hear the river rushing past, but the vision is a cloud of green beneath a pale blue sky. A watercolor.

Far upstream is a dam that keeps the river behind it tame and domestic; broad and deep above the dam, swift and wild and shallow below. Here in the forested margins you can look up and down the river and imagine it looked like this a hundred years or more ago. I come here often.

If you stay still and have the patience, you will see deer cautiously approach the river then stand in the shallows to drink. I watch as one doe timidly steps to the shoreline, then another and, soon, a third. They wait there, looking anxious, peering up and down the stream and back into the woods. Their flanks ripple nervously. A red-tailed hawk shoots across the river and screams once. The deer pay no heed. They step into the stream and as the first one dips her mouth to the water, the buck emerges from the trees. His vanguard skitters aside and he walks into the flowing river like a prince. He bends to the water and the others follow.

I sit on a fallen tree on the opposite bank admiring their grace and grasping for an equation, an identification with the buck. I want to feel his instinct, his assumed power, his natural command over the does. But I can’t because I would feel responsible for them. He sends them into danger to avoid it himself. For better or worse, I am another species altogether.

I lie back and stare into the foliage overhead. Its green is also the color of jealousy, and of bile. I have a surfeit of both. I think about the woman I love in the arms of another man, and I shudder.

When I was an infant, this was the River Styx. My mother bathed me in it to protect me from all harm, but she held me by the heart. Like Achilles I am vulnerable where the guarding waters of the river never touched.

Today the river runs black, edged with deep brown. It is the color of my morning coffee. The sky above the river is mottled with storm clouds that seem not to move unless you look away for a time and then look back to find that their shapes have shifted, expanded, disappeared.

The smell of wood smoke drifts down the river from an unknown source and a pair of mourning doves call to each other from a cottonwood tree. Six sharp shafts of sunlight pierce the gun gray afternoon like golden guitar strings. They strike the water and sound an open chord in the key of sadness. My friend Walter tells me I’m too old to be defeated by heartbreak, as if I should be immune at my age. He tells me to pick another fish from the ocean—or the river—but they all look like spiny creatures to me, like dangerous fruit de mer. I’m not in the mood for bait casting, fly fishing, spinning rod fishing or any other kind of fishing. To make Walter feel better, I sometimes drop a line into the drink with only a sinker on the end. I while away some hours pretending.

I want her back. And, yes, I know, as Heracleitus said, “You cannot step twice into the same river.” Were we ever there at all? Did I delude myself for all those years?

Something splashes nearby and I walk down the shoreline to find a walleye that has flipped itself into too shallow water and I watch as it struggles then gives up, panting for breath. I step into the water and place my toe beneath the fish then kick it back out into the rushing stream. God I wish someone would do that for me.

The river is blue today. The color of a lie. The breeze is icy and it chills me, crenellating my skin with spiked hairs on bumpy nodes of flesh. I take a nickel from my pocket and skip it on the water. I ask myself if there really is a Book of Liars. I guess we all have one, and those of us who are most fortunate can’t find it anywhere.

I look into the river and ask it why—but the river doesn’t reply. It’s the perfect therapist. It’s going to make me come up with my own answer. We piece together the world with patches of ignorance, filling in the blanks with the only answers we can muster. And yet, watch anyone else but yourself and see their self-deceptions, then ask why might you be any different? We are dumber than the fish in this stream. At least they know which way to swim to get back to their source and they do that with a vengeance, bleeding and leaping silently, the way that we should if we’re trying to get back home again. There’s a place far upstream where deep pools of truth can be depended on to never change. Unlike my life beyond the river, where truth comes in spurts and leaves me guessing at the rest.

Today the river runs red because it is filtered through my bloodshot eyes. My sockets ache and my eyeballs look like crimson gum balls from bawling like a lost child.

I wouldn’t be crying if I didn’t have to give her up. I am imagining my mouth on her breast, the feeling of her nipple sliding over my tongue, the stiffening of the areole. She is wet, like the river, and I can hear her moaning and whispering her assent. Her voice at that moment is my favorite song of all time.

I sit under a willow tree and calculate that we must have made love more than two thousand times, each time building on the last and coalescing into a bible of knowledge about each other, a personal kama sutra that instructed us night by night how to give each other pleasure.

I ask myself, Why in the name of God did she ever want to do that with someone else?

Today the river is white. Over the frozen surface, covered with snow, patches of dark green show through where the wind has blown away the crystal crust. The river is ice to a depth of two feet and all its denizens are crowded at the bottom. I walk across the ice as if I have just learned to ambulate, the ice creaking and sighing.

I think ahead a few months to warmer weather, when the ice breaks up. Great green ragged monoliths rising and groaning and crashing down upon each other like mad whales. The sound of it like rolling thunder, like the end of the earth. And then the river breathing, rushing, hissing.

I am frozen. An engine that won’t crank. Immobilized. I try to pull my own heart away from her but it snaps right back, time after time, like a wet tongue stuck to an icy flagpole.

The river is gold today, the gold of her hair. I can see her spiral lockets waving at me while bubbles burst past. And there—she turns in the water, smiling at me, her mermaid smile, her Mona Lisa eyes. I think of standing before Leonardo’s mystery girl and waiting, waiting, waiting . . . until she winks at me.

The sound of the river is a Motown song that makes you snap your fingers and shake your booty. The smell of the river is the scent of her perfume. The taste of the river is the taste of her.

Today the river is almost yellow. It is the color of my cowardice. I stand at the edge of the water and look down. The river looks back up at me, reflecting my fear. Or I should say my fears, for they are manifold.

The man she lives with now jumps out of airplanes for a living. He rides a motorcycle to work.

Dryden wrote “None but the brave deserve the fair,” rather nonsensically, I think. Wouldn’t a woman rather be with an interesting coward than a boring hero? Apparently not.

And I’m reminded of Cormac McCarthy, who finally explained to me why ladies love outlaws: Lastly she said that if women were drawn to rash men it was only that in their secret hearts they knew that a man who would not kill for them was of no use at all. So okay. I would do that. I would kill for her.

Tonight the river is flowing silver, luminescent in the moonlight, and it gurgles a basso requiem beneath a soprano trill. It sounds like the Throat Singers of Tuva accompanied by the National Women’s Choir of Bulgaria. I am giddy. I don’t come here often at night.

I walk into the river carrying a large stone tied to my neck with a length of rope. The stone is heavy and I nearly stumble in the shallows, my feet unused to the rocky bottom. I make it to waist-deep water where the Tuva singers override the choir and turn my back to midstream. I take a deep breath—why I don’t know—and kneel slightly in preparation for hurling the stone over my back as far as I can, out into the still gray center of the river.

I am exhausted from playing Sisyphus with the damn thing; my lungs are bursting and my legs are on fire. I’m gasping and gasping. I’m afraid for a moment that I’ll drown accidentally and the irony of that thought brings me energy. I bend my knees and dip my butt into the water and repeat that motion until I have the strength to throw the stone. I heave and the stone splashes in the water behind me. The force of my effort merely knocks me over backward and I wind up sitting in the water. The stone traveled just a few feet, landing partially exposed on a rocky outcrop surrounded by cattails. I get up and haul my rope in. I pick up the stone again and turn my back to the deep. Again I gather my strength then fling the stone over my head. I hear a satisfying splash and then a jerk on my neck. The stone is sinking and I am dragged behind it. My neck hurts badly. The river closes above me, surrounds me, enters me. But in a moment I feel the rope relax and I am floating downriver in the current, spitting water and laughing insanely at myself. I float there on my back, watching the skein of prophetic stars arrayed in homonyms across the sky. I have no idea what they mean.

The river is transparent today. The color of clarity, no color at all, no shades of gray or shades of meaning. It simply is . . . water. Running to the sea in an ancient and forever cycle. On a protruding stone in the shallows of the river the red-tailed hawk devours a fish. The deer recede into the woods. The scent of clean water. I have better things to do than weep into the river.

I become that red-tailed hawk. I flap my wings once, twice, and I clear the water. One more flap and I’m in the air, flying above the river, breathing the air above the water, seeing the distant tree line, feeling the sun on my back as I spread my wings. Below me the river has disappeared, replaced by a vein of dark ink. I land in a giant elm and tear a feather from my wing. I dip it in the water then soar far above the river. I write her name on the sky, then watch it disappear.

§ § §

Glenn Osborn is a freelance writer, designer and photographer living in Perrysburg, Ohio. He is a founder of "Scrawl: The Writers Asylum", a workshop for writers, and has been managing editor and designer of the ezine, The Story Garden.

Glenn operates a website design firm and a successful photography business selling prints of his digital photographs of flowers.

His work has been published in The Story Garden, Melic Review, Writer Online, Ink Pot, Lit Pot, and elsewhere. He can be reached at: glennosborn@buckeye-express.com.

This piece was first published in INK POT #4 - 2004, a literary journal.

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