waiting,
the way hawks
refuse to apologize
for flight.
To let in the light
like earth lets in
the shining prophecies
of rain,
like monarchs
let summer dance
gold on the open invitation
of their wings.
To brother the wind.
Not to choose between
tomorrow and today.
Not to refuse the liturgies
of the waves,
the rhetoric
of the glittering sun
spilt.
To be undone.
To note the descant
of a cloud, a cormorant,
tree crickets’ hum,
the signature
of glaciers scrawled
on lichen rock.
To defer to the willow.
Not to prefer ignorance
to the theories of swallows,
the languages of the air.
To enter the concert,
the stirring,
the singing,
the way the bulrush enters
its blooming,
the way sky enters
the glow of evening,
the green-turning-flame
of its song.
The Calling
And so it is, the lake is calling you,
dropping in your ear the small consonants
of its lapping. There is no resisting.
It insists on shivering water into light.
You have beheld this silver before.
In dreams, it’s the radiance you wear.
The jangle of shroud against mast:
a language you have come to understand.
It has let you in on its secret. So too
has the dark slipping by of the cormorant.
Soft, the verbiage of a passing
kayak, the lisp of the paddle’s dip and rise,
the narrow body’s thin blue glide.
A word has perched on your tongue, but
refuses to be formed, tastes like
storm-rinsed sky, the wind-downed
rhetoric of pines imitating the slow dance
of waves. Acquainted with all manner of
waiting, the dock grows patient
with your sitting, your staring, your curious
forward-leaning. Listen: water
tapping, pulling at the hull, the metal siding
on the plank-wood pier. It circles out
from your dangling ankles, a shimmering
map of echoes, farther, farther—one
rippled articulation after another. The lake
is a mirror, a question you cannot answer—
yet one you choose to enter.
Make Me River
Make me river, cold
with mountain, green
with quiver, silver in
the run and churn of
winter leaving, valley
waking, sheet moss
breathing. Make me
flash of mica, drift of
foam. O Lord of flux,
make these dry bones
flow, teach me to spill,
pool, glide, fall, tutor me
to long for depth, seek
downward paths, indwell
the low. Oh teach me
liturgy of keel, swirl,
flume, the breaking into
mist, the pull, the press,
the song. Oh form me
into blood of bedrock,
quest of glacier, dream
of sea, release me, set
me free to course, surge,
pour, sweep, issue, eddy,
shower, plummet, roll.
O Lord of flood, O Lord
of spray, unstill my soul.
The Way A Fish
The way a fish
moves through water,
through light, the way light
