Believe me, we have met
our obligations, made ourselves
into terrain, behaved like rivers
between hills, let sediment
settle, warm, fertile, into our beds,
have become what feeds prairies,
filling the hungry brown mouths
of tributaries. We have grown
steady, ebbing, fed ourselves
on nothing more than sky. And
sometimes in stone basins, high
in the hills, lain still enough
to be mirrors, unwitnessed
but for all the changing light.
With you,
I am foam brook, ribbon under
dappled trees, sun-bright water
clear all the way through
to the bottom. You wade in
to the ankles where I'm new
and young, pass through me
at a place still unnamed,
where I’m not a drop spent.
