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About the stream

How shall I speak of this flowing through every channel

that pounds, raucous, where the ways twist, then

floods silent as a full tide in broad

ways? I move in it and it flows, transformed,

in me. So much of our world transmutes, pours

from one holder, one shape, to the next,

and yet it is shapes we name, not the flowing forces.

I have one name for myself, though I am both

this shape that would break, and the stream that rises

to meet thirst, like milk from the breast at a cry.

To shape words to this stream is like wrestling with the angel:

brute stubbornness shifting for an opening as much

as it is finesse. But I would be its channel till it

wears me away, gleaming, like those burnt

into memory before death and madness were

to pay. Did they go reluctant and compelled

after the power let the neighbors know

something strong and strange looked from their eyes?

Or did fiery streams trafficking through them

make death and madness nothing beside that glow?

Incarnate

Muscle and bone, tongue and eye,

ponderous or swift we live it out:

meaning embodied, the messenger the message.

If there were another way, we could save

lifetimes, but none can write so the reader

rises and leaves all that she has,

or by singing cast out demons.

Meditation in the Quaker Meeting

Friends when I think of my solitude I think of the jeweled swamp

set with eyes beneath and above the water and in the trees

gleaming and shifting; of waters lifting and the settling leaves

bringing together the water life and the life of the air.

Friends when I think of my silence I think of a golden dome

of sound without words, of the snap of eyelids and the creak of jaws,

of the roll of balancing banks of air when one of us moves,

and of my hand in water, lapped by tremors of passage.

Friends when I think of my search I think of the faceted glow

splintering off the broken face of the water beside my boat

at night, and how it fractures the more, the more I row,

and how it is still and almost whole when I stop my arm.