Along the straights ahead the spillway beside the hamlet & beneath a leaning boxelder, hidden penstocks feed a turbine’s thriving hum while a silent heron stands in the morning shade. She’s gone still since the mergansers moved north below the flashboards. They paddle beside a teen standing on a rock beyond the bridge, then scatter when he drops line for a throw-back bass. But the silent heron peers across time through the youthful silhouette, a Munsee boy spearing fish, one more visitor come between Kittatinny Ridge & the damn-chute at Sturgeon Pool where pent-up water weir-falls to the Roundout at Rifton— drawn to the north’s Spirit of cold endurance but sprung & stepped down from the south side of the sacred circle, the Lenape Spirit of growth.   She stands above the bottom shale, air-side & dry during drought, now covered by the column’s flow, black-fly larvae anchored on an aging dross of cadmium & lead. Yet for all, there is the oddness of time calling back, always calling back to the patios & cafes where couples & elders & children look to the water, to the ducks sputtering & settling, to the bald eagle perched above, to the mallards hiding in plain sight along the millponds. It is the call of vanished names— Twischsawkin, Pochuckin, Mamekoting, of the forgotten slowness of a lazy rise from rain, the familiar flood-crests before the Dutch, before a thousand storm drains, before the slag & mill scale of finished steel, before the plum trees & first caretakers went missing, & before the late arrivals came to love an old river surviving & ask if it might ever love them back.