Water Takes

March 26 2016

Snow,
coarse, gritty, pitted

in moth-bitten clumps.

Glistening pools, in cool sun.

And muddy rivulets

trickling downhill;

the path of least resistance

water takes.

The indecision of spring,

fitfully shifting

between freeze, and thaw.

Before birds return.

Before grass greens.

Before saturated land

settles, and firms.

When the world is flat,

in dull variations of brown.

And I can smell the earth

coming to life,

the pong of loam, rot

rebirth.

When worms surface,

wriggling, squirming

struggling for air.

The first rootlets

push up, and out,

probing, sipping, getting to work.

And water, seeking its level

gurgles underground.

A still life, in words. But not really as still as it seems. There are the returning birds, the nascent  roots, the struggling worms. Even the shifting seasons.

And most of all, water – water flowing, sublimating, evaporating, re-freezing; water gurgling underground – moving steadily through the piece.

It’s when the poem descends below the surface that this becomes clear:  all that motion, hiding in plain sight.

Invoking the sense of smell is important here. It’s easy to be purely visual in something like this. But scent is powerful, visceral, sensuous. And never still, its vibrating molecules concentrically fanning out at the speed of smell.

I thought the title should contain “water”, since this is what cinches it together. The word only appears twice in the poem. So I simply cannibalized the line that works best. I like how cryptic this title is, because this is once thing a good title does:  it makes the reader irresistibly curious to read on.