In excitement of where it's been
And joy at where it's going, driven
By the universal urge to share its source.
Its tongue slips down the grooves
Of the ridge, disrupting the mirror,
To give still forms fluidity, that projects
Against the trees, as vapor through air.
Its exuberance sends a force of bubbles
Freed for coupling and exploding
Their ordinance on the sheet upstream
Where underneath moss and clover sleep.
Even in the middle of the night it speaks,
Sounding out syllables in patterns,
The pleasure of needing to enunciate
And of making breath auditory,
And in this voicing it finds peace,
Untroubled by the resistance
In its entanglements
To its essence, as it flows.
The gurgling doubles around the bend,
In a call and response echo, a duet
On all the ways love becomes beauty,
Never ending, each murmur a variation.
It plods its road, fills the space
With its reply, sounds the stones
And their crystalline overtones,
Never ceasing, like a heart, to be known,
No matter how far below the willow ash,
The gray veined brush that, overgrown,
Hides what is alive
And what is merely dormant.
It pours itself out, in endless replenishment,
To some chalice down the ravine
That also can't hold the energies
Of light and water, and what they mean.
It is enough to feel it in the flowing,
To nurse it along the serpentine path
With a gardeners ear on the ground
To borrow the mind of what is tended.
Thus is ubiquity filtered through
The smallest slip, to be realized
Again and again, in the moments
Barely aware of the poem they're there to form.
