The Ash Bringer

A grainy predawn dark, early Expressway traffic bleeding arterial tail lights across gray water and its blue heart. Under Lemon Hill, grunts from Boathouse Row, woodshop clunks, young men’s voices too loud for a day exhaling into starless skies, bad boys after keg night, hungover, push long sculls into the water and slice its marcelled run, a marbled peacock wake behind each stroke and coxswain counting that muscled steadiness past the Water Works, Spring Garden Street Bridge then Girard Avenue Bridge, where on the bank Eakins sketches Max Schmitt in a single scull, his light like this, tinfoil blue, where the crews sweat off last night’s lost time but won’t row too far north to river canals, Manayunk Reach, its towpath, mules and barges and anthracite from Point Carbon to feed stoves and Bessemers in Harrisburg, Pittsburgh