We walk through day’s heat.
I am crushed and torn with heat
With heat and thinking
Skating and skidding on a knife’s edge
Between analysis and exhaustion.
Cold inside and trembling at near 40 degrees.
We reach the pools, to the cry of
“Here be nymphs”, which dry me inside
Sneers at. And we strip
Air’s small flurries ruffle wrinkles,
Ease stretch-marks.
Forty bodies greet air and water
With as many years between eldest and youngest.
So cool.
Yet so warming inside.
Laughs splash, flight droplets
Through glistening light
Leaf-softened, rendered
More complex, but better -
Like ideas and analyses:
No air without water,
No analysis without laughter.
I find my own pool, seek
Soft where greens
Dapple into yellow water
And air sits silent. I’ve felt this
Elsewhere: where snow
Wraps sound and thought
In a blanket that speaks “calm, now, calm”.
Polarity at play.
Rock’s seat invites me
And I sit. Quiet.
Ripples sink in their good time,
And mine; murk, too.
In time, small fish, then bigger,
Return and partake of me,
Of my tenderest parts,
The biggest bigger than
The cock that dangles there,
Bait without a hook.
Air gives way to water’s soothe
Slowly, as, slowly, sign of mutual comfort,
Minnows delicatess on skin.
Early April
99
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