River Brothers

nonfiction

note: a typically superb manually-typed letter from the singer/songwriter
and river brother who’s let me perform with him five times , Jeffrey
Foucault, in reply to my letter of congrats on reaching his 50th birthday.

23 April 2026, Shelburne Falls, MA


Friend Duncan,
This morning the house is empty
save me. The dog
is dead and buried in the yard
along with the cat, close but
not too close, which was how
they liked it, gray
stone for the gray cat, red
brown stone for the red
brown dog, and a chair between,
weathering out. The birds are
yelling and the sun just got
up over the hill named Massamet
a long time ago by people
who may have been here eating salmon
for ten thousand years, so from
the dining room the house is an inverted lantern, all
the light outside, and I am
seated at the dining room table
without dog or cat or fire
reversing the spool
of this old machine with inky
fingers, feeling the stillness
of the house in the morning
and the quiet show through with
muted birds, and the dime
just dropping on the first
coffee as I follow my brain
around like a dog on a leash made
of shaky convictions. What can I say
about 50 that will surprise the
man of 74? Not much! But I will say
this: the day we met you left your eldest at college
and my daughter was 1. The other
day Hazel came home from school
where she is gamely pretending
to give a shit, as he mind hovers
around the college a hundred
miles east where she’ll start
in August, so plainly doing
the psychic work of the change
now, building up some scaffolding
of what it will be, surely
much of it nonsensical and yet
perhaps vital in some way, and
she said they watched a documentary
and you were in it, talking about
rivers, and she said
she wanted to pipe up, “I know
him!” but she didn’t want to
call attention, and kept to
herself that when she was six
or seven we had marched her
to Colt Killed Creek and seen
the miraculous and baffling pod
of salmon
And what a gift from you, but moreover
from the world, to that tiny long
gone blonde girl at the dawn
of another human century, to see the silver
darkness of those creatures pierce
the farthest arteries of the breathing
heart of the land.
And now she’s winding up to make
her way in the world, and like you
when we met, I’m holding the telescope
the other way round, and I’d be lying
if I said my hands didn’t tremble.
So.
Thank you for your letter. It was
a good party, snowed in, with old
friends from away and new friends
from town here, and raw oysters
delivered by mail from the Cape,
and good white burgundy, and a magnum
of Chateauneuf from 1976 because what the
fuck. KD, who knows me well, wisely
stowed the out of towners in
an airbnb down the street, so in
the morning I could fuss the house
and light some sage, and do the dishes
and listen to Nils Frahm
As I thought about this long strange life
and the many good people in it
and whether I was on balance
joyful to wake back into it
every morning, and
I am.

(signed) Big Love,
JF