It hasn't been the same since Hoover Dam
was built: the river never floods out the streets
downtown. There are no recent photos
of tidy cars parked in new-made shallows,
basking like crocodiles, shopkeepers
measuring the high-water marks of the past:

The time the hotel foundation was destroyed.
The time the Gutierrez brothers
took turns riding a kayak
down Main Street. The time
a drunken Quechan, what's-his-name,
fell in and drowned, and his body
nearly made it to the border,
where it got stuck in a tangle of branches
and mud after the water went down
and the Border Patrol spotted him
in there and mistook him for a Mexican.

These days, the water is not allowed to break the banks;
reservoirs are carefully filled, allotments given
over to farmers and cities. In the land
where rain comes once or not at all each year,
this means that water is a sign of order.

Once in a very long time,
it rains somewhere up north,
and right below the dam
where lazy river-goers paddle to hot springs
and camp on the embankment entrance
to narrow side canyons, where the sky is clear
except for tiny storm clouds over Utah;
at night, the canyons start to trickle
and water creeps up to the boats, into tents
and washes everything away.

Survivors cling to ledges, barefoot;
some are blinded as as their broken glasses
race downstream. At dawn, the danger is over
and a soggy collection of undamaged boats trolls
for gear. A civilized rescue, methodic, weary,
stops at each beach to take on passengers.
People return to the trailhead lot to find
new layers of earth deposited: their cars
are somewhere far beneath.

The excitement doesn't make it all the way
down river. We only read about it in the paper,
look out on the sluggish water, barely present,
and wonder that the same river is in both places.