Chris Offutt - The Same River Twice pg. 9 lyrics

The Midwestern land has a soft undulating quality, like concentric circles spreading from a rock tossed into a farm pond. Before the giant plowing icebergs, water covered everything here. Often I see the bottom of an ancient ocean quite clearly-the ripples left by forgotten tides, the gentle unsweeps of a reef-and I imagine that the land is still under water. I possess grills in the woods and move against the resistance, exploring an abandoned sea Cloud shadows are great fish moving swiftly overhead. The prairie disappears into the glare of refracted sunlight fading with the depth, and becomes the living floorboards of an ocean. Jet contrails in the sky are a ship's prow, cleaving the surface far away. Breath bubbles around my head as movement slows. Sound drifts into silence. I have slid out of my century and into an undersea past, alone with an uncaring force