So small it is, what gathers in this empty round of clay
As the rain takes over the air, glistens in grass below.
Yet so real, that small enlarging circle of grief.
Where the light falls may fail
something else along its edge
close enough to see it
but not be in it or of it
Sun streams through stained
glass but not to the people inside
under the shadows each of
their individual Gods
My bench in the shade got cold
but all I had to do was walk
a few steps past the walnut tree’s
highest eminence now just
shifting sparkle and shadow
at my feet — even on the ground
I’m higher than spires
my limbs bound to no rooted
trunk of belief — I know
I’ll float freely one day
but I’ll fall like we all fall
and the landing I have seen
against living’s gravity
is almost weightless
By this river
My river starts as a creek that idles like a train loading up kids at a park
then slides underground, quickening beneath the destroyed black neighborhood
beneath the cheap hotel and its parking lot that was supposed to be a mall
and on downhill past City Hall where it bursts into the open thirty feet below
the police station parking garage then sidles back under the concrete
and into the dark again beneath a parking lot called The Wharf though
it hid the only waterway in the valley so sometimes when I want
to touch the current of my life I feel a parking space stripe that
hand-wide line white or yellow painted over and over for years
until it’s a physical presence not just a visual guide the layers
of paint countable like tree rings when what I want is the rush
and gurgle of what’s just below our pedestrian lives
Translations from the English 