sun-shallow days
you can hear the rocks
coffined in sludge
and slime cry to heaven —
sinners who hoarded
wealth and wrath.
A stillness finally seals the pond —
heaven’s last incarnation
for those who forgo mortality.
Reading Ponds
A retired businessman, escaped
from his scheduled life,
trolls in yellow waders through
the braille letters the pond writes
for a country of clouds,
a message he cannot read.
A spinster—silk tulip
in her straw hat—sighs
for the lovers she never had,
and tosses a stone into the pond.
Do the circles call to her,
or does she call to them?
Convent hymns fill the pond
with prayers and petitions
as a novice in her late twenties
looks into it as in a mirror.
A fish ripples her images—
a confirmation she is losing
her pride or a warning
about taking final vows?
A flock of mallards passes overhead.
Perhaps the pond weeps as they pass;
or are they trapped in the long silence
that quiets them over the horizon?
The Mississippi River Talks about the Book of Genesis
I was born in Genesis. My father, the great domed sea, made me so the moon could preen over my currents and give the stars a place to sparkle.
I am wiser than the callow land that seeps through me in its race to the Gulf of Tears where the souls of sinners go.
Fickle winds may scribble cuneiforms on me, genealogies of suicides and skeptics. But I outlast these winds, truants to tranquility, loose tongues tattling variegated tales.
My children, who preserve the world before time was counted, have now been parceled into seasons. Gar, gators, turtles, cottonmouths, bullheads, raptors, cormorants, and sliders.
I paint rippling murals on shorelines, swamps and lowlands, backwaters, oxbow lakes, coves, and eyebrow-shaped islands. My colors crawl, swim, and fly.
Brackish muskrats and wide-toothed otters; mussels and mud-speckled trout; snowy egrets, little blue herons, red-tailed hawks—all know my voice, and I theirs.
When the world ends, I will still hover over the Deep.
The Fugitive River
It goes where it has to. No shores
shackle it. This river keeps its beginnings secret
and its ends. Like the moon it may be full
and silvery with fish, or a slivered crescent
following a fleeting raft. But always
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