Water’s Arrival

Water’s Arrival

Pace of me horse,

sun of the river shine,

blaze of the lambs, the wire,

the time to tune and play.

Gasp and grasp the thin lines of

eerie scenes come circle

to bang the drum and

lift the eye like the mind to

perceive and light and its reward

like the wave lengths and science of the sky

as a wart, an algae mound, a fungal protuberance

waxing as the pregnant belly.

The confused nurse, the hand maids and squires laid up,

line up at the street office of the local government to

volunteer for hunger rations and service.

To be let out of confine,

make delivery as the mom cat behind the stove,

the bear in a cave, the chick in her mother’s egg.

Grateful is the next generation,

arms, ears and snouts in line with the economy,

the rule of earth as the trade winds or hot cycles might suggest

as the crops die and the water turns a thicker brown and

can’t quite make it to the sea.

Our plans of reverie.

Our game of wait and see.

The bills come due and littered straw blows from the frozen barn.

The leaky roof and howling gales give over dumb matter

to sand blast the graffiti from the road.

The rogues left spaces where the houses have been and

the fires test the mountain ridge and leave a toothless grin

where the rocks sustained the baking pyre and

all the waters into the dry earth fled.

Even cloud dispersed beneath the summer eye of the sun’s intense concentration,

its leveling of myth to an ashy dust.

We give up trust and plan to make our way alone.

Apocalyptic or slow as the leaky faucet, our

words heavy as mud laden boots in molten lore,

red blood and gore as on the slaughter house floor or rather

where the hoses spray the clean-up out the door

to mix with dirt and straw where children put patty cakes in the sun to bake.

Where bread is leavened at the oven’s door, where good heat rises on the updraft

for carrion feeding raptors have the little rapture of the bleeding and the passage,

the little wall all going to crumbles. Rupture.

The dancers and feathers in a show of bellies. See us thrive,

see us eat and dive and live like grass eaters, herbivores

in a sea of waving seed beneath a sky of unrivaled sun

until the good night does come and as the blankets we curl up in also grow warm,

the worm in turn muscles down

and the architecture of our arrival is cast as a wave smashing the beach

leaving the sand all but unchanged.

All but there, we linger at the barriers of chaffed red hands and barbed wire.

The bait and the barrel full of glum time oily as the noose suspended in the gloom,

the noon tide, the sums begun in earnest to tell like the ditch of remains.

Craven, sinful things, baubles replete as congealed blood, rubies with eyes,

sentiments buried as the tents by a landslide, the fraying edges of the flags

that once whipped with wind are as the wet straw, smeared in the mud,

frozen in the attitude beyond victory and defeat.

Beyond the reach of suburban trains, the gullies, smudges in the rain

run and gather up the gauntlet of the rivulets, as on the wind shield come together,

Rolf's Poems and Pictures

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