There was a meeting here once, a merging of water,
two streams whose watersheds stood back to back
along the smooth granite planes of Donahue Pass
where once I thought the pounding in my chest would be my end.
I lay on my back that day, gasping,
head pressed hard up against the lichened rock, each turn
in rugged trail brought disappointment,
the pass still out of view.
Mount Lyell stood there, remote, and out of sight around
a monolith pink-speckled, Rodgers Peak,
a quadruple divide country. One face flowed down toward
the Lyell fork, where bears would take our food;
another to the east, to dissipate in sterile
alkaline and salty sumps, and the remainder
into the San Joaquin and the Merced. An inch apart,
the San Joaquin and the Merced, up in the land
of Adams and of Muir, and then a hundred miles apart
they reach the Valley.

There was a merging here once, a confluence of water,
til the dams went up, and sucked the Sierran riverbeds
for liquid Federal cotton subsidies, this was the spot
where San Joaquin chinook saw their Merced companions
depart eastward, where storms that spent themselves on the divide
were once again made whole, but now
the San Joaquin is drained, its water drizzled out
to leach salts from valley soils, to collect and pool,
to lure migrating birds looking for lakes gone half a century
which drop gratefully into the selenium-marred waste.
Their young hatch out blind and wingless.
Once a sodden mass of tules grew here, grapevines
thick for miles, and sycamores, box elders,
once Lasthenia and Fritillaria filled the broad
wide spaces in between riparian tangles,
but now the land is sterile, furrowed,
an expanse of brown corduroy pressed flat upon a flat table.
Walk down to the bank, walk past
the broken white foam cups, old alternators,
bottles of motor oil, their caps long gone and
dry star thistle, wind-whipped plastic bags,
walk past the ankle-high barbed wire kept treacherously strung
along a row of downed and hidden fenceposts, to find the water
thick algae-roped, warm, mucilaginous and green.

There is a spot upon the Merced’s banks
where, sunwarmed but still clear, the river glides
on glacier-polished rock, flows fast and sweet and smooth
and then? And then the earth falls out from underneath.
Six hundred feet the river drops, Nevada Fall,
and though the brink is marked abundantly
by signs — “If you swim here you will die” —
each year a few walk past the warnings, swim,
are flung out into space, and fall.