The Upper Iowa River is cold

in early October, but autumn ways

attract rather than deter young campers

barely getting past summer this morning.

The night before – while old constellations

slowly, quietly turned above our Earth,

above invisibly migrating geese —

dreams of departure arose in our sleep.

With dew on our faces and hot cocoa

warming our senses, we gladly enter,

sliding our canoes into the river.

Starting out, we’re talkative, questioning

signs written by rocks in rippling water.

Which ripples indicate smooth transitions?

Which indicate that we should go around?

It’s easy to get stuck in shallow streams.

Adventurers do well to remember.

But soon the sights swallow up our sounds,

and silence prevails as we cease to speak —

for we see the hues of autumn displayed

on the riverbank tilted towards us

with yellow maples hanging overhead

releasing leaves even one of which holds

our attention as it slowly drifts down

finally floating on the same river

which urges us to follow the same way,

led downstream by leaf after yellow leaf.

Sweatshirts off by noon, we find a sandbar

to warm our bare, soaked feet and to eat lunch.

Styrofoam coolers, plastic containers

litter the beach casting shadows over

clumps of sedge. Settled among them we spy

a dragonfly with broken wings, bloated

with age and dying — a would-be dragon! —

gleaming with bright sea-green, but disheartened

with crippling spasms, eyes compound yet blind.

We carefully unwrap our sandwiches,

and slowly bite down as we bravely gaze.

After lunch, downriver, trees are replaced

by rising walls of stone — unlivable

save by cliff swallows whose nests of dried mud,

like wheel-thrown pottery, hang on the walls.

The swallows are not home now having flown

south on sky-rivers to surviving woods.

The great blue heron and the kingfisher

still fear our capacity to intrude,

but it’s the outsiders who kill their trees.

No, in conjunction we still dream their dreams.

We dream of a huge bluff ablaze with fall —

crimson gold spectrums mixed with evergreens

overseen by those wise, dusky-red oaks.

Though paddling alongside we see lofty

limestone cliffs, better is the source of all:

Malanaphy Springs.

We will climb her rocks,

clinging like the moss and fiddlehead ferns,

standing uprightly and inwardly turned.

Lee Enslow is a founding member of Third Stanza, a society of Ames area poets. He has worked as a custodian at Iowa State University for 24 years.