Inspired by Camille Claudel’s sculpture “The Wave”
Almost like a fist
the great wave of war
rises now, arching,
all froth and force,
and in the single instant
before the crash,
before our demise is cast
in onyx or bronze,
before everything
we’ve made is smashed
like plaster on the floor,
this chance to conceive
the world as it could be,
the chance to take
each other’s hands
and hold them fast
so the terrible wave
can’t separate us.
The wave will break.
We will be towed and tossed.
My friends, it matters
that we stay together.
to see this sculpture, visit here
Posts Tagged ‘water’
The Single Instant
Posted in Uncategorized, tagged camille claudel, connection, ekphrasis, moment, war, water, wave on March 5, 2026| 6 Comments »
Fountaining
Posted in Uncategorized, tagged fountain, life, water on September 30, 2025| Leave a Comment »
Inside us, life
like water leaps up
from the source
to discover itself
in relationship
with light and
air, glittering
as it catches
the sun, changing
its shape in the wind,
returning to source
as one water,
leaping up again.
One Reason to Show Up
Posted in Uncategorized, tagged fire, service, water on June 6, 2025| 10 Comments »
the whole world is burning
and the only way to bring it water,
the bucket of you
Water Speak
Posted in Uncategorized, tagged goodbye, language, lovers, river, water on April 25, 2025| 4 Comments »
When you say goodbye
fill each syllable with the sound
of the river as it kisses the shore
just beyond our window,
then, no matter what words you say,
I will hear the unending waves,
will smell the musty,
earthy scent on my skin
long after the words are gone.
There is home in the way
your words cling to me
like water beads on my skin.
This is how I remember
where I am from.
One for My Daughter, Made of Water
Posted in Uncategorized, tagged daughter, river, rules, water on January 14, 2025| 4 Comments »
the river must follow its channel,
but every cloud can tell you
water also flows up
Self-Portrait as Sedge Meadow
Posted in Uncategorized, tagged grief, nature, water, wetlands on June 28, 2024| 4 Comments »
After years, grief now grows in me
as honestly as sedges grow
in the wetlands. As necessary
and as benign as fresh water.
As generous as the scent
of rain. I would not wish grief
away any more than I would
wish away the blue heron,
which is to say I now see
grief is an essential part of my biome,
how without it, other parts of me
would perish, how natural it is
to be saturated as I am by tears,
how abundant grief is, how alive.
Love, Like Water
Posted in Uncategorized, tagged grief, love, water on May 27, 2024| 8 Comments »
We could say the pain
was a block so great
it could not be moved.
We could say love
did not try to move it.
Love simply dissolved the mass
and surrounded it
the way water meets a block of salt,
breaking apart each ionic bond
until every atom of sodium and chloride
is surrounded by molecules of water.
And in this way,
and sooner than you’d think,
the pain was rearranged
into minuscule bits,
and there was no part of the pain
that was not touched by love.
The pain was no less, it’s true.
But mixed with love, dispersed,
the pain became something new.
Something vital that encouraged
a different kind of life,
a substance that supported buoyancy—
a medium to carry me.
When Everywhere Is the Right Place to Start
Posted in Uncategorized, tagged ars poetica, dowsing rod, science, trust, water on February 12, 2024| 7 Comments »
It’s like when dowsing rods swing back and forth,
twin tattletales of all we cannot see.
I’ve seen them twitch and cross—a sign that water
is nearby. A sign this spot’s the perfect
place to dig a well. A scientist
would say it’s luck—it’s in the dowser’s walk.
They’d say that everywhere’s the perfect place
to dig when everywhere you go has water.
I know the feel of dousing rods inside
my blood each time I meet a blank page and
then try to say what’s true—my inner rods
will quiver wild or simply sit there, still.
And what a thrill when they say, “Here, dig here.”
It’s more a matter of how deep, not where.
So Slowly
Posted in Uncategorized, tagged grief, healing, life, paradox, water on March 12, 2023| 12 Comments »
I don’t know how refusal
melts away like ice in the sun,
how resistance evaporates
like a puddle, or perhaps,
let’s be honest, like a sea.
I only know that since I stopped
fighting you, grief,
there is peace in me,
even when I am weeping,
even when everything I am
feels bruised with loss,
even when I burn.
I only know since I stopped
swimming against the undertow,
I have been carried
to the most astonishing places
and I did not die.
I was given new life.
It is the only
way I can live.
When I Get the Message from the US Embassy That There Is a State of Calamity in the Whole Country of Guatemala and My Thirteen-Year-Old Daughter Is at that Moment Traveling There Without Me
Posted in Uncategorized, tagged daughter, fear, mother, trust, water on June 27, 2022| 12 Comments »
My heart races like a plane
traveling 575 miles per hour
to a country beset with flooding
landslides and significant damage
to roads, homes and buildings.
I watch myself rise from the table
and start to pace the house.
Are you really going to freak out?
I ask myself. I watch myself act out the answer.
Anxiety rushes in, bringing with it
the detritus of recent trauma.
I can’t lose another child, I think.
The idea floats atop wave after wave of fear.
You’re not being rational, says the mind,
but the adrenal medullas above my kidneys
start pumping hormones into the bloodstream,
And I pace the rooms of the house
as panic rises in me like tropical rainwater
gushing over riverbanks.
I hear an inner voice that says,
Even if she is not okay,
you will be able to meet whatever comes.
But I do not want to.
My lungs can’t get enough air.
I want promises she will be safe.
I want guarantees she will be protected
from harm. I want her wrapped in my arms.
My friends says, There are a lot of other mothers
in the world for our babies,
And I think of how I trust
the woman my daughter is with.
I think how I trust my daughter.
But the world, can I trust the world?
My friend listens when I tell her
I have never been a worrier,
but now I know too well the stakes.
She says to me,
You are not the same woman you were.
In that moment, I sit in the lap
of the truth, and though I don’t like it,
it comforts me, holds me
the way I wish I could hold my daughter.
I am a woman who knows
what it is to lose a child.
And I am a woman who
has been carried by love
when I could not carry myself.
I notice the panic and do not wish it away.
Of course it is here.
I feel cradled by my humanness.
I breathe out and in, out and in.
find the current in my breath—
sometimes a torrent, sometimes a stream.
I let myself ride on it.
Coming Together
Posted in Uncategorized, tagged intimacy, love, togetherness, water on May 17, 2022| 7 Comments »
Driving over Dallas Divide
I thought how not all streams
are destined to come together—
at least not for a long, long time.
Imagine, two snowflakes landed
side by side atop the Divide. Come spring,
one might flow west to the San Miguel,
the other east to the Uncompaghre.
It would be over a hundred miles
of flowing through beaver dams
and irrigation ditches, rapids
and eddies, before the waters
could meet again.
And so it is tonight, I feel a rush
of gratefulness that however
it happened, you and I have somehow
managed to be moving right now through
these landscapes of change together.
Think of all of the paths
that could have pulled us apart.
And yet here we are, you and I,
moving across and around obstacles,
you and I traveling together
through everything the world
has thrown at us, you and I.
diverging and coming back together,
two bodies, many possible paths
one water.
One Divining
Posted in Uncategorized, tagged ars poetica, water, words on April 29, 2021| Leave a Comment »
using words
as dowsing rods—
there, the current inside
Tempted by Comparison
Posted in Uncategorized, tagged comparison, river, stone, water on February 23, 2021| 2 Comments »
Today I know the self
as a stone in the stream—
everything around me rushing and quickening,
and me, a way to mark all this moving.
Amidst all the bubble and rush,
a stone has its own very slow journey,
and yet, there is no doubt
the stone belongs, is doing
exactly what a stone should do—
which is to be true to its stone-ness,
to know itself as a traveler, yes,
but also as an integral part of the path,
a model of consistency, seldom
in a hurry, inclined to show up
exactly where it is.
Clear Instruction
Posted in Uncategorized, tagged memory, purity, snow, thirst, water on October 26, 2020| 2 Comments »
Tonight my daughter
closes her fist
around the first snow
squeezes to make it
into a small cold ball
the shape of her hand,
and then offers it to me.
It tastes like sky,
like electric charge,
like winter, like childhood,
like curiosity.
And once again
I’m a girl who walks
to the neighbor’s yard
for a drink at the well—
I pump the heavy lever
and it draws clean, clear water
from the ground.
There’s a red metal ladle
hanging from a nail
on a nearby tree,
and the water tastes of moss
and rust and freedom.
There is a thirst
that’s been bequeathed us—
a thirst for what is
untreated and pure,
a thirst I somehow
manage to forget.
If it could speak,
the thirst might say,
Remember, remember,
remember.
Ballistic
Posted in Uncategorized, tagged stone, water on May 16, 2020| 4 Comments »
Oh my dear Rosemerry, let’s remember how water is always moving & shining.
—Sandra Dorr, private correspondence
And so though I am stone,
stuck and dull,
can’t move or shine,
I think of how a rock will skip
when it is round and flat,
how stone turns skiff
when thrown with spin
and speed and slant—
one flick of a wrist and I
can bounce, can hop,
can dap and for a brief time,
shine.
Oh life, pick me up,
give me a toss,
low and quick.
I’ll sink, but first
I’ll fly.
*readers–this poem has a little secret. can you tell what it is??
Perhaps Next Time
Posted in Uncategorized, tagged invitation, risk, safety, sea, water on February 20, 2020| 2 Comments »
Vast and powerful,
the invitation
like a sea
with a surf
and unknowable tides—
I do not want to stay
on the shores
of my life.
I want to run headlong
into the waves,
to feel myself buoyed
and challenged,
to know myself
as one who risks,
who emerges
shimmering.
Swimming to the Island
Posted in Uncategorized, tagged baptism, body, poem, poetry, swimming, water on September 2, 2019| 2 Comments »
I didn’t intend to swim to the island.
Told myself it was just a quick slip
into the water. Told myself I would
rejoin the others soon. But the water
said yes to me. And my arms and legs
seemed to remember then
exactly what they were made for.
Sometimes we’re in service to something
more primal, a voice that says go, go,
keep going, though there’s no race,
no finish line, no prize, no spectators,
nothing but the thrill of becoming
the body’s bright verb. Feel how
the water buoys you, even as your weight
pulls you down, how it shimmers as far as
a woman can swim, how with each
stroke of your dripping arms,
the lake christens you again and again
a child of this very here.
Abundance
Posted in Uncategorized, tagged friendship, poem, poetry, sally, water on May 9, 2019| 5 Comments »
for Sally
In these days, we don’t speak
of drought, we speak of water—
the impossible blue sea near Phuket
and the wide Colorado River.
We speak of turquoise and green
and aquamarine and you make water
with three hydrogen molecules.
We speak of the bull in India
that stored water on its back.
We speak of drinking black chia seeds
as they did in the desert.
We speak of the coming storm,
of floods, of the deluge,
the way water changes things.
It is no surprise that I think of you
as water—something pure, something
necessary, something true—
and in these days I choose
not to think of drought, I think
of turquoise, green and aquamarine
and wish it for you.
Unlikely Love Song
Posted in Uncategorized, tagged drought, poem, poetry, praise, summer, water on July 4, 2018| 8 Comments »
Praise the summer, with its
endless drought. How you’d rather
revile it, change it, pray
for the world to be another way.
Praise the sky, relentlessly clear,
and the dry field that crunches
beneath your feet.
You dream of green, dream
of laughing in the rain, dream
of puddles and the thin river
rising. But praise the scarcity,
how it teaches you what
you would rather not know—
how fragile the balance,
how every drop matters,
how lucky it is
to grow.
One Time Signature
Posted in Uncategorized, tagged desert, poem, poetry, song, time signature, water on March 6, 2017| Leave a Comment »