All summer, I watched them
make their ghostly caduceus through water—

fleeting, heraldic—

A time comes of silence and secret Sargassos,
the desolation of tourists and billboards,
a time of seamless ennui:

Sometimes, on evenings like this, my mother will speak of Tom Scott,
going down to a place inside her beyond the river's high reach,
to a place where grief has no pallbearer except the river;