Raceway

Red-leaved maples stretch over the water here, this sluggish alternate route dug out of this side of the land as a race way for the mills, now overgrown, lost in weeds and reeds and fallen trees, a civil engineer's nightmare where fishermen and kids dangle their feet from the low wall.
Unlike the main river where the brown water charges down from the Garfield Falls, this compost, this syryp oozes along concrete banks rising and falling with the level of rain, sometimes inching over its restraints to creep out onto the road leading to the bridge, leaving a small lake before the high doors of the ancient paper mill, leaving store keepers from the shops up the street on islands of parking meters and traffic lights.
Even in dry times when the main river thins to a creek, revealing its ribs of countless communication cables strung along its bottom, this passage remains plump, bolstered by two hundred years of leaves and residue, that primorial slime out of which the next generation of human kind might some day emerge, touched now by the sudden shift of seasons, as ice begins to crystalize its edges.