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Alone, On The River This Spring is a chapbook of poems* inspired by Sudye Cauthen's year alone in a dilapidated trailer in the floodplain of Florida’s Suwannee River. The chapbook records her first months on the property where she would build in 2002. The title poem, reprinted from ISLE, the journal of The Association for the Study of Literature and the Environment, 1997:

ALONE, ON THE RIVER THIS SPRING

The white lilies burst like stars
from the sides
of the road
and become a part of me,
the blue-eyed grass,
the first oak leaf,
flinging its curl of saffron into the sky.
The red sheep's sorrel spreading in my heart
becomes a part of me,
and the cry of the barred owl in the dark,
my name in his throat.
And the wild rose azalea--its feathered lips,
and the sounds of the winds in the tops of the river birches
driven back on themselves in a gale,
or soughing softly above my head.

And the white fleabane and the purple spiderwort,
the large pale moth with bulbous eyes,
and the ragged huckleberry, its fruit
I take in my hand. The skirts of the old cypresses
exposed at low water become a part of me,
and the mushroom, lichen, and fern.
And the clear light of morning laid like a broad
stripe on the surface of the water.
The paw paw’s flower, the tendrilled grape,
and its first purple clusters
rising in the pine.

And all the changes of winter into spring--
bare limbs sheathed overnight in green,
the disappearance of their curving black trunks
beneath knitted vines, the palmetto’s ribbed fan.
The bass stereo from a distant car that passes each day,
scraps of words drifting back through the woods
from the road where children walk, coming from school.
In my blue window: two cardinals fighting in flight,
wings fanned, beaks joined--a double heart of red feathers,
ripping their shared center apart.
On clear nights, the dark
pours itself into the trees, turning the earth black
under a luminous ceiling,
and my own parents appear: he that fathered me,
and she who carried me in her womb.
I hear their voices here.
Clasping my cat in my arms,
above the wide expanse of the river,
I catch their shouts flung down from the trees.

This chapbook may also be purchased by check or money order in the amount of $12.95; the order should be sent to the address for North Florida Center for Documentary Studies below. Sales of this book go to support the work of NFCDS.

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