Tag Archives: river

Full

7 Replies

march31moon

Full

It’s after cats but before owls.
The moon fills its pockets and hangs

Out behind the house next door.
Like the sky’s a comfortable side street

You can ride a skateboard or bike along
And find a new favorite skipping stone

You’ll hold onto until the next time
At the creek, which will be days from now

And you think of the curve of her shoulder
As she threw and the water was too

Respectful to swallow the stone, the
Three steps it took on the water and the click

Of it coming to rest on the other bank
And like that you’re rising, full of someone

Else’s light, up above the neighborhood
And the whole world can see you now,

Like the sun on her shoulder,
The whole world can see.

Summer Midnight

5 Replies

cactus1

Summer Midnight

A man wakes in a hotel room
In an unfamiliar time zone. He has all his memory

and yet he carries nothing with him from that time.
Like the new summer from the spring he is all effect and no cause.

Outside in the dark he walks as if on the floor of a great sea.
But the ground plants have sucked all the water from the place

And have taken on a strange bristly beauty as if floating upwards.
Opening his mouth to say a name the word dries on his tongue.

One hundred and eleven degrees: three above auspicious.
Of the river his lover grew up alongside and the low-tide’s waves

Of the bay he knew as a child he hears nothing. But he hears
a message as when a great wave has washed over you

And floating in the foam you find a scrawled message
from the past forecasting that a wave is about to crash.

The hotel swallows the moon like a horizon.
One lizard on a row of stones.

On the Source of the River

12 Replies

On the Source of the River

On the mountain rain falls, snow melts.

The source of the river is the sky.
So it is that the source of love is not within reach

But flows over me and carves my every direction.
The source of the river is the spring. So it is

That I can never go back to the source of love
but it spends itself constantly on my behalf;

So it is that the very earth is between us
but the very earth gives a way to us in the shape

of a river. The source of the river is a bog.
Like energy, love has no direction. It can be hidden

as potential until the porous ground can hold
no more and it breaks into acceleration

embanked by our lives, carrying us beyond
ourselves towards a wider body evaporating into the sky