Formation of Oxbow Lakes
by Nathan Koblintz
October 2023
Formation of oxbow lakes
for Bryce Good
Imagine rubbing against the very kink
you’d chosen for yourself! A river does it, coming to the brink
of meeting itself and then, like the taut yolk
of a fried egg released by the stroke
of a knife, it oozes through with a final sigh.
This wasn’t how you put it, Bryce, but you can cry
a river to the boy whose hand
was held up to interrupt, as a groyne does the drifting sand,
the monomania of the tide
that made you teach us year on year these dried-
up water features, the lest-we-forget moraine
at the end of the syllabus. Sustained
through the seasonal VCR of the spur
truncated by a one-track glacier,
and the water surge that squeezed the air to popping
point in a cracked rock, lopping
off a bit to bash against another rock,
my hand remained up. You had me in the dock
for it. But after the sentiment
settled, I could tell the class in my most elegant
way that, pearly and set free, the oxbow never fails
to remind me of my fingernails.
