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
doubles the body
of the fish, turns it
into a mirror of itself,
the mirror being
the water’s invitation
to see a bright pool
of scales where
once there was a fish,
a school of silver coins,
a great, green-glass
chandelier dangling
in the flow, each cut-glass
drop sewn like sequins
to the wind, the wind being
the way the water moves
around the coins,
the coins being another
way to see the fish, the way
it moves through
water, through light
the way it doubles, becomes
a silver mirror, the mirror
being the fish disappearing
into a thousand versions of itself.
Learning To Pray
When I say I have passed the afternoon
watching loosestrife lean against the wind
at the edge of the lake, what I mean is
I have stepped into prayer, not unlike Peter
stepping out of the boat, and it has held me,
as prayer does, like a child holds a penny,
or ferns hold beads of dew. When slippage
occurs, as it is want to do, and I begin to sink
through unraveling molecules of faith like
a dream sinks back into dark when dawn
dissolves the net of sleep, I am caught by a
quiet grip, an open palm, the way air catches
a parachute or a June buttercup catches light,
and there is in that catching a new kind of
drowning, not unpleasant, though it surprises
at first. It’s like losing yourself to an embrace
in which the more you are lost, the more
surely you are found; it’s like the flood of sun
on the map of your skin, into your cells
and the spaces between your cells, sewing
you into its warmth, which, you realize,
is singing. How often have I stood at the edge
of the lake gazing, wholly unsure what it means
to pray but willing to step out, willing to go
down, slip through the watery blue particles
precisely to be caught, recovered, salvaged
again and again, to know once more that hand!