Lampions on the Wu

The Wujiang runs turquoise between limestone walls, a color so decided it looks administered. At a quiet mooring below the cliffs an old wooden sampan lay tied, woven roof, four red lanterns on the mast, a small bird auditing the bow rope, and the boatman let me sit aboard while he smoked and the river did the moving for all of us.

I wrote in the notebook with my feet up on the gunwale: tomorrow-notes, the kind you take before a place you have read about for years. Somewhere upstream of this exact water, under one of these green mountains, is the hall I have crossed a continent for. The river passed its gates for eighteen years of construction and was never once told what it was passing.

The lanterns swayed, the bird approved the knots, the cliffs held their pale silence. Rivers are the best archivists: they carry everything past and keep nothing. Tomorrow, the town below the mountain. The day after, inside it.