Welling Up, What Trickles Down:

A response to Alistair MacLeod’s “No Great Mischief”

A whirlpool funnel mirrored in the surface:
as frothing eyes peering from fathoms and fathoms.
Telling tales: ripples and torrents. Each drop: a word
Coalescing in a rainbow spray of story.
Delved for and hunted by a man. A lost soul wasting gas,
and silently away.

In stillness and rapidity,
Refreshing, leaking human profundity.
Each trail down a mountainside, or cheek.
Drips and currents, carry away what once was ground in,
Leaving only the strongest rocks and burnt, hard mud-caked beds.
Or cold, hard, life-stained eyes.
A man in tears, the earth in courses:
These tears. these beads, of many weeping.

Separating, welling up.
Always in flux, and yet returning down.
Down to the beds below what the eye perceives.
There is a place where tear drops meet to become the ocean flow.
Salt and bracken, filthy barm.
Silt and dirt, and loss and destitution,
Purity and brilliance, caught in a prism,
washed in the washing, and lost in the telling.

Wet and soft, the yielding force.
The strength of water is the earth’s remorse.

It bubbles out where the binding skin of earth is broken; delivering what it is to be loved: It is better. We are better.
We are better when the flow breaks over us, when we dip our hands, our sodden hands Into this, our past.
Each wave forgets that it is not alone.
Each drop or puddle fears having been forgotten.
A tumult, breaking of rock brings home the lost.
In pain it tells us what it is to be loved:
It is better. We are better:
In this our story, our past, our hope. Our well.

Briana disappearing

Sweat is dripping down her shoulder;
In each moment, she gets bolder.
Suddenly her tiny feet,
Slap against the ground to meet...
the air, in a wide and open bound.
Her body soars without a sound,
Until a mighty crash of wave:
A splashing call to not behave,
Welcomes her with all its cold
Drops of transcendental gold.

Her face searches for the surface,
Then she’s bursting out with purpose.
In the air, she gasps like bellows,
Hearing insects: flutes and cellos.
Sweat is dripping down her shoulder;
With each moment, she gets older.

Bailey's Hands

Her hands are tiny and held tight
against her chest, her heart beneath.
She spreads them out to my delight,
and forms a sign; her thoughts release.

A pinky finger bent, goes straight;
a thumb to follow suit, and then
(I watch her work, my heart it aches)
She tries to point one more, and bend

the two remaining fingers down
to rest against her soft, pink palm.
Complete, she turns her hand around
to say those things we say to Mom:

“I love you,” “Mom I’ve said it. Here.”
Her little fingers have that gift,
of words they said I’d never hear.
To some fools silence is a rift;
To me, it holds the sweetest tears.

Lifting Off

How about I dance away,
And watch your tailspin dive;
From a place where I can see
The crash, and stay alive.

On every tracing falling whirl,
I’ll lose a textured thought,
A piece of connectivity
With every hope you drop.

I don’t believe your time is gone;
Some crystal sands remain;
Not dazzling or remarkable,
But crystal all the same.

I wouldn’t mind reclaiming all,
Your broken lines and brush;
but I can’t bear to tangle up
My last soft bits to crush.

It’s simply not my place to try
and float your wearied shell;
I have my own belabored craft
To guide away from hell.

So as I think about this last
departure I won’t make,
Believe me when I say there’s more
than just your heart at stake.

Untitled

I slip into
A hot release:
A tub of wet
And froth and peace.
My floating hair
Slips underneath
The line of wet;
It follows me.
Together we,
my hair and I,
Soak up the heat
And then we sigh.
This time alone,
Without a sound,
Without a clock,
My will rebounds.
After a time,
Who knows how long,
I pull myself
Into a song
of stand and stretch,
and splash and burst
my feeble legs
begin to lurch
back into life,
and into day;
from rest to run:
I live this way.

thorns and torrents

Refusing to heal
you pick at wounds,
and flaws to keep them fresh,
And grasp them dear to you
That which has been your worst…and best.
It is as though the thorn that tore
Still rests inside your scar:
That thing, that moment you abhor,
the Root of who you are.

How much better, if it would
Remain and give you leave
To be a broken piece of skin
A welt allowed to grieve,
But time slides on,
And pushes out
That poisoned point of age.
To recover, to release:
Relinquish to the grave,
That thing, that hurt, that tiny piece
Of life, and barb of pain,
And become some healing thing:
quiescent, flesh again.

Let go of what you long to be,
The waters of your past:
The dripping sloshing currents
Of the break that broke you last.
These things create you, shape you twice
Or more if you agree
to hold on to that trickle,
While its nature begs to flee.
Allow the flow to carry on
And with it yield the rot
And then a puckered, honest scar
Reflects what you are Not.