Partway

Put on the slick moss
and cold water.
Lie down in the stream’s center
and be a rock
upon which the waters divide
and then rejoin.

Or be the bird that lands
upon that rock,
ascending at night
with wet feet
to who knows where,
what warm and dirty nest
in trees or caves,
softly breathing,
all alone like the wind.

After Bashō

The frog and the pond
in the haiku are in
the haiku.

If Then What

A recent poem, "If Then What," is part of the mass of poems (I like to think of them as stones in a sort of digital cairn) that make up Poets for Living Waters. Curated by Amy King and Heidi Lynn Staples, the project is an online "poetic action" in response to the rupture of oil in the Gulf of Mexico this past spring—though it also speaks to the circulations of water closer to home (wherever you live) that pass through your watershed, your backyard, your cellular membranes.

You can find it in their collection under "W" in the Open Mic section—good luck finding it—or just read on below (but be sure to check out some of the fantastic poems they have posted).

*

If Then What

The sun’s reflection smears like an oil spill,
lost in sea or air, who knows.

The sun and then the moon are altars
of light and stone.

A voice in the alley said to speak
the names of the creeks:

sewage, soda, ocean spray.
Move into the flow, it said,

press salt upon your forehead,
upon your wounds in the surf.

What if we uncovered the waterways
beneath highways, watersheds in our nuclei,

if we used our new names to remember the old,
or became the taste of iron?

If the images have sunk beyond recovery,
what new waves will remember the history

of ferns and dinos?
We can sing and drive

home facts and morals,
from delta to Dakotas.

Mississippi and Great Lakes
will part our greasy hair.

Ingress #1

Don’t recite the unwritten histories of sediments
or instruct me in decoding the script of the moraines

until we’re deadlocked in rush hour and you can sing
the anthems of third shift to the syncopation of a train track.

We can lie out in smog and fog, drift through fluids wherever,
if we’ve heard the same one song that rocks the San Andreas

and determines the curvature of magnetic fields at the outskirts
of the visible sky, sailed across event horizons into the vortices

of gopher holes and storm drains and all creatures’ resonating tracheae.

Earth Song

O circulating cell,
wrapped with dust,

all rests upon a root,
life rushing beneath.

I press two feet to you,
soles in osmosis,

and my mouth shapes a seed.

If I rest against the trunk,
a gradual spine,

the bend of shade reaches
down, your hands over my eyes.

Then I see our horizon, swaddled
in skin and bloodstreams,

turning into turning.

*

[This is an old one that has, for some reason, stuck with me for some years. How do you weigh your own attachment to a poem against the more objective sense of its "worth" or "quality"? Writing for myself for so many years gets complicated when I imagine a public audience, even if only an unread blog.]

Trash Haiku

Bottle caps scattered
down the cracked, salted sidewalk.
Rains wash these sharp, dark seeds.