On June 20, the summer solstice, we took a River City Poets "field trip" for our monthly workshop...to write by the river. I was surprised by how many folks in our group had never visited the Pipeline walkway before. For me, it's one of those uniquely Richmond places that I come back to again and again. Just river-ward of the Floodwall on the north (downtown) side of the James, you can take a ladder down to a walkway built on top of an outflow pipe. Traintracks run overhead. On either side at various points, there are bits of beach and boulders where locals hang with the herons. Pulling up a patch of rock to do my own writing, I found myself thinking "this is how we should always have our workshops: by the river in the open air, with only the sounds of water and stone and train for distraction." I know that's not practical. But it seeded the poem! (whose title is a nod to Rainer Maria Rilke's Letters to a Young Poet)

After Rilke, on the longest day

Leave off your books.

Do your apprenticeship by the river, lost

in soft weather of stone and slow grow 

of shadows until you are unwrung: 

know / forget all you’ve learned of wild / of 

order rounding vowels to fit the break 

of rapid / white space a sweatstain 

a rust faded into rivulets of churn 

and stalk / the loneliness of a train

/ traffic so distant, it might not exist.