Secretary

Nance Van Winckel

At a meeting about what to do about the river, blue was the face—the face after face, blue rims around the words: the water's too hot, the water's too low, the fish shouldn't be lying around dead like this on the rocks; and okay, I'll keep the minutes, a tick-tock and the flick-flick of pen like a silver paddle entering the flow, out of the blue eddy of wordlessness, the scritch-scratch of No Remedy passing first under the fall of sighs before the bridge of suicides, meaningless beneath the blue feather tips of kingfisher who shuns the deeper blue that runs beneath the page's hurried minutes mounting up and up before blotting out our blue-speckled days.