A WALK BY THE RIVER by Dale Jacobson (Audio Clip)

from PART TWO, Section XI

I cannot imagine my own annihilation
-Walt Whitman

Huge cottonwood and elm trees
loom over the river-the windy shadows
of their branches are cool dark countries
shifting on the water surface.

I skip a stone across those spaces
into the clear light. It bounces between
sky and water, a wing without will-and sinks.
Nothing rends those shadows-
not a stone, nor a body falling into them.

Only the tree leaning into the river
attracts its black reflection,
growing to meet its disappearance.

Those grains of wood that are its continuity
will weaken and decay-open their spaces...

This elm is the physical memory of itself-
seared into its side is the scar where lightning
walked down its trunk, seeking earthly waters...

But further on I find a hollow stump
where the moon has dined on lost seasons-
the mysteries of night have entered that cavity,
devouring each ring outward, hollow workings...

The river is a long journey that seems longer
the older we are, we're told never the same river,
though always falling the one direction it knows:
down-all griefs learning gravity.

from A Walk by the River (2004, 58 pages)

"I cannot imagine my own annihilation," said Walt Whitman, but Dale Jacobson imagines this very thing in language that Whitman would have loved and in ways that he would have cheered. A WALK BY THE RIVER is filled with metaphysical musings, inquiries into mortality, and memory, but this Dante does not descend into the underworld for answers; he stays under the stars, on the banks of a discernibly Midwestern river, trusting his own imagination to carry him on, endlessly.

-Joyce Sutphen


One of the central and most generally averted themes of our times...
a poem of the first importance.

-Jack Beeching


Dale Jacobson's A WALK BY THE RIVER is a masterfully written poem, full of depth and resonance, and quintessentially American. The poem's current pulls you in and sweeps you along on its spiritual journey. This is a river that can take its place proudly beside Williams' Passaic, Twain's Mississippi, and Thoreau's Concord and Merrimack.

-Robert Hedin

"I've come to conclude that Dale Jacobson's A WALK BY THE RIVER is a masterwork, which I won't undo with the usual quibble, "minor." It is as it is as no long poem has been since Thomas McGrath's lovely LETTER TO AN IMAGINARY FRIEND- a trek to define identity without the tricks of rhetoric, without reliance on a particular time or tradition, and with only suggestions of the bare edges of rough science, and so an exposition of the lineaments of self, the lone walker along a river that leads, over a period of personal desolation, to questions at the heart of the organizing power of personality- justification, self-congratulation, evasion, aging, all joining hands. The reach of A WALK BY THE RIVER is for a rest from that. The rest is pursued with excoriating patience until life songs lift up, and the dark valley and chasms of existential defeat are spanned in the manner of a leap of faith. There must be love, the narrator seems to discover, in a kind of starstruck wonder: "the seal's wide, spindrift gaze toward paradise," as Hart Crane put it. It's a book all manner of people should read.

-Larry Woiwode, poet laureate of North Dakota

The following audio clip is from The Moe Green Poetry Hour hosted by Rafael F. J. Alvarado and Stacy Mangiaracina, February 6th, 2008. A night of Red Dragonfly Press poets Floyce Alexander author of The Ice House; Freya Manfred author Swimming With A Hundred Year Old Snapping Turtle; and Dale Jacobson author of A Walk by the River and Metamorphoses of the Sleeping Beast.