The Connecticut   We’re drawn to rivers — lifeblood of the land, mirror of the sky, mater aquae. Rivers give rise to poetry, mythos — the hand of the Almighty carves these valleys, gives us sustenance and stories and love, or maybe the river is wisdom, or time, or a fictional forever. Ignore the river at your peril — it knows.                                                        I’m thinking of this river — the Abenaki named it for what they knew to be true, Kwenitekw, the Long River of talking stones and fish of every kind, the fusion of this world and the next. In the storms that whip up whitecaps, in the icy strange winter silence, in spring floods, in the warm caress of summer, the river is change.     © Michael Fleming Dummerston, Vermont August 2022