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.