Fluid Mechanics

Gas-chugging motor rocks

the plank floor of the River Express;

the motion of Bangkok, of the river people,

of Southeast Asia

is the thumpthumpthump of a motor

idling in the chocolate brown water

the quick and liquid pulse

through your legs,

momentum, inertia, all comings and goings

commanded by the laws of fluid mechanics.



The Mekong flows

from Tibet to Ho Chi Minh City

one long roll of silted and

sluggish water, heedless of flags flown

on its banks and the sterns of its barges.

The needle-thin boats thread sandy islands

between languages and political lines

The only thing real in a world of shifting borders

is a shifting meander plain.



The water renders all things on the banks

sandy, unreliable, unsure,

houses built on thin stilts and sand.

That winter wave, when the ocean opened its great

throat

and swallowed shoreline and structure and life,

was one of many proofs ­ 

that to water people, to villages of linked rafts

floating marketplaces, dockside stalls

and pulsing inboard motors, the only constant

is the crawling river, life collected like a delta

on the edge of a chaotic element; the eddy and swirl

of ephemeral life and unpredicted death,

the undertow of fluid mechanics.

© Kathryn Hunt