Fish with Hands
I am afraid that if I blink,
I said, in the darkness I will find
that I have made you up.
Don’t let me see that you have blinked,
you said. How do you feel, I asked.
How does the wind blow?
you answered.
Yes, I said, I see.
So you are flesh and blood, I said.
Sometimes I remember scales,
there is a river, you said.
I hear it, I said, it tingles
down my back. I put my hands in it,
you said, fish swim between them.
They kiss my hands, you said.
Sometimes I stand next to a river,
I said. I have a cup in my hands,
I am walking into the river,
waist deep with sun on me.
I go under and I can see.
I am a fish and I swim between hands,
Now I kiss the hands.
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Sometimes There Was a Light
There were times I sat along the river that spring,
before my life led me away,
stripped days of rusted cars, bedsprings, old barns
passed on the grown-over shore path,
when the sun sank through the heavy sky
in such a way it created a light which touched
the sand, packed hard by the river’s flood water,
so it softened in my fingers and eased collected heat
into my bones stacked above it;
and the bark’s dark leavings that clung
to logs drifted up and docked
on shore, so I thought I could read
their life stories: ground coaxing from roots
the loss of connection, the cut of air in their falling,
the only sound of their grief, the splash
of branches in icy water that dragged them
away from the only place
they had know in their long lives;
and the water on its course
through the fields of ten farmers--
cut by so many springs there is no one alive now
who has known it straight or even
heard tell of such a path--
winding its way though the green pastures;
and touched, even my own skin-- that was the way
I knew it best, that light,
for when a thing has touched you,
you know something of its intention--
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