Headwaters

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.
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