Scott Ruescher

Against the Current

At the riverside camp run by indigenous entrepreneurs,
in the lush lowland jungle of eastern-most Ecuador,
a few hours downhill by bus, truck, and motorized canoe
from capital city Quito, twenty miles from the borders
of Colombia and Peru, I swam in place against the current
of the Cuyabeno River, disregarding the small piranhas
that nipped but didn’t chew, and mindful of the nocturnal
crocodiles in the shallows of the lagoon around the bend
whose gold eyes had glowed at our flashlights in the dark
when we stood on the shore in awe the night before.

Keeping my distance from venomous snakes and malarial
mosquitoes on the bank, I alternated the standard
breaststroke with the common crawl, then rolled onto my back
in time to admire, flying upriver ten feet above, a flock
of blue and gold macaws, like a slew of winged arrows
drawn from the quivers of camouflaged hunters
who’d never seen a conquistador before—a contrast, in form
and color, to the ungainly brown hoatzin birds known
as “stinky turkeys,” the homely green turtles basking on logs,
and the gangly gray garzas I’d seen the day before
on the same muddy shore of the crocodiles’ lagoon.

While my fellow viajeros slept in, in open-walled huts,
dreaming, maybe, of tarantulas, jaguars, anacondas, and boas
on mosquito-net platform beds, at the camp in the clearing,
I did the backstroke, inhaling and exhaling with each pair
of strokes, and watching the pliable branches, in the highest
boughs of the trees on the bank, bending under the weight
of spider monkeys chattering and tempting their fate.

Then I rolled over like a skinned log to continue my steady
crawl against the current, making minor waves of my own,
and wishing that the freshwater dolphins we’d seen
stitching the surface of the river the day before, bowing
their pink and gray bodies for aquadynamic oblong effect,
and using their sleek skins and fins to ripple the fast water,
like me gaining strength in resistance to a greater
power than my own, would flank me as I swam in place
against a watershed loaded with cold gray run-off
from the glaciers melting on the peaks along the cordillera’s
corridor of volcanoes— Cayambe, Chimborazo, Cotopaxi—
on route to Rîo Aquarico and its confluence in the Amazon.

Scott Ruescher's new book, Above the Fold, is available from Finishing Line Press. He has new poems in Black Horse Review, Pangyrus, the Somerville News, and The Lantern --the online magazine of the Colby Museum of Art. https://www.scottruescher.com/