The Water People --for C

 

They come in search

of the water leak—

700 gallons a day disappearing

 

just like your endless want

rushing somewhere

filling up some unintended tributary.

 

Occasionally, often on Thursday,

you forget your thirst,

find yourself on the Nile,

begin a new expedition

to the source.

 

Between dawn and dusk

you re-invent H2O,

its simplicity

melded into impossible complexities,

every color lined up in quivers,

blue plus blue is more than blue

you conclude.

 

But there it is—

700 gallons a day,

and somewhere someone is performing

all kinds of oceanic acts

 

without you

 

a couple of words

faucet on

faucet off

 

You draw the holy triangle

in your water book—

Noah, Moses, Jesus

surviving water

dividing seas

divining wine.

 

Your wooden staff

trembles before

unseen depths,

you caterwaul after water nymphs

and babies—more water

than woman.

 

Your knowledge of water,

vast as the sand

during the lowest low tide ever.

 

You think you know

where to find the reddest crabs,

the largest starfish,

and after you find them again and again,

you know without thinking.

 

She is certain

my innocent garden

is the culprit,

pulling back the fence

again and again

to examine

my small vegetables.

 

They tell her nothing

in their tiny green obstinance.

 

The gargantuan forests,

the redwood giganticum,

gulping down 1,000 years of water

while she thinks only of her cup of tea, tomorrow.

 

The water moves slowly and surely

beneath the night

in cahoots with the moon,

tearing down boulders,

rotting dead wood.

 

in the undergrowth,

watches the crows—

how they transform water

into hard beaks

and blackness.

 

A man can only gauge so much

with his blue eyes

full of water.