From the radio Handel's Water Music,

The movements of form and formality,

Overture, adagio, lentement, bouree,

King's barges gliding on the Thames,

The Lords and Ladies arranged in pomp

And poses studied as a Thornhill painting

As twenty oars dip and pull, keeping time,

Royal Musicians bored long before Chelsea.

But here, driving across the Mississippi,

The water thick and brown as a mudslide,

There is nothing regal or prepossessing,

Nothing strictly metered andmeasured

In the lurch and lag, slip and snag of

Tethered rusty barges of coal and corn,

The tugboat nudging them downriver

Around deep bends and the shallow

Sandbars, barely skirting stone pilings

Under the bridge where the dark water's

Form and flow surge and separate

And converge again around the deep

Draft of the barges that seem always

To be more than the river can bear,

Sinking in the rhythm of the water,

The one note of the tugboat's horn.