water

Sometimes Water Sometimes Ice

--We owe the rain

a pat on the back—bare foot it

has walked

with us with its silver passport all over the world.

                                                William Stafford

                                                Wovoka’s Witness

Earlier it was impossible not to want

to hold out my own hand too and make

to shake the great bone and muscle

and skin and bring it to my face

the way I’ve seen the deeply penitent

need to be after all those miles

in the dust and mud and fall into

the river with the rootless

trees.  And it was impossible to not want

to bend to my own knees, depleted

of meaning while the tide claimed

the great beach again and again and again,

with regularly.  We've all come this way

after all, you and me, and shit if we didn’t

need a clean glass of whiskey and deep,

and with it the extended, the revenant

hand offered to us.  It’s the hand we’d spent

the whole pilgrimage searching for, isn’t it:  

those copper spots along the snake-vein track 

in the wrists lined by time, a scar

railing down into the silent sleeve:

the land-scape pocked in there, maybe

plowed a thousand times through

drought and our own hallucinating thirst. 

It reminds me somehow that at night

I can hear the tressels, awake and still

shaking with a long line of trains going by

and I think maybe the men and women

riding them think about home and the road

going out into them, toward or from, and all

they have are those two or four or six

beams of light: the lens of eyes stricken

in their dark: it sparks the doe, the possum, the one  

coon, scooting them out into the way of the rain.

Safe as a scattering of clouds in a surprise wind

that draws up leaves, remnants that have, since just

last week lain thin in their woods, fallen

and some sudden, then, just then, puff

of a ghost breath lifts them up by the wrist

of their stem.  And all at once aren't they are

paper dolls in continuous row, and they

folded and let go of over the water they’d laid on.

Drop by drop.  Into the cup of the lucky one

come this far, to know such a drop,

isn’t such a string of treasures worth wearing

into the sun, when it comes up, which is

if you look up—look! Look up!

Just now.