When What’s Dowsed Speaks Aloud: : : I'm River I'm Lake I'm Rain

When What’s Dowsed Speaks Aloud: : : I'm River I'm Lake I'm Rain

I grew out of all this

like a weeping willow

inclined to

the appetites of gravity.

                                    Seamus Heaney

                                    “Kinship”

I'm bottom

and under – a bottom

more than bottom – yet all

you men see

(before my bodice froth is glass

then chop –)

is froth in the slough

and spume.  It’s later, off bottom,

my muffled tongues

are beneath a day that started so

benign the unseen shudder

of it is another kind of sin

settling into your lung.

While some were saved,

it's the children on shore who are

the doomed

viewers, who'll

wake up coughing –

but me – liquid breath – I see

everything after the mud’s

swept by the wave’s broom:

a body, a hand print,

a shoe a picnic basket,

a raincoat tarp.

Listen: it’s something

when one heart

relieves itself, 

its utter last rhythm,

in me

but another

if it’s all those eighteen

or twenty and counting,

the two or three

who tripped

their ground

and jumped

and through the fizz &

their own weak wind

gained enough to retrieve

their solid ground. 

Don’t think I don’t know

what happens

here.  Curse me yet.

And though you will never swim

again I know it’s you

who watched,

who stood

until your boys, your girls, couldn’t

push back.  All that fun

gone seductive until they sunk

and clung

twos and threes

while I drifted –

always drifted and 

drifted by – anonymous

as God’s only first

wordless thaw.