Running Away from a Man Who Might Have Been Tim

By. Emily Bowles

This river is a living thing, ice in chunks moving toward me, pulling me into

its mutable monotony--always becoming what it was without ever being the same.

I speak to it, my voice like Johnson’s or Eliot’s in imitation, in submission, 

and call it Father Thames, as if its movement makes meaning where instead 

there is only an absence of words, a locked in tide, a river of Tims, of common-

place men and me, running alongside until the road breaks in two.  

I read it TH-ames once, with immediate shame, my professor glancing at me

through glasses perched on the edge of his sun-damaged nose and not

correcting me directly: instead, restating it, placing the emphasis on it.  I 

knew in that moment that my emphasis would always be in the wrong place,

my tonedeafness an inheritance of class and region as much as of melody.  

Now I say it like Tim, who is a bike repairman, a firefighter, a banker, a teacher,

not someone deep enough (we are all deep enough) to possess in its depths

the stories of Shakespeare, of Pepys, of Wordsworth, of Dickens, of Conrad, of Woolf, 

of men and women whose words have weight like anchors, like bricks, like 

water.  Father Thames; father Tim; farther Thames, and farther, farther from Tim.

Emily Bowles writes poetry that explores the hidden stories of historical women while also striving to acknowledge the gaps, absences, and omissions in what we can ever know of others' experiences in their lived bodies. Her first chapbook--His Journal, My Stella--was published by Finishing Line Press.