USA

amy@shookfoil.org

Water Music

I was trying to be slow, to pace myself and linger
at every garden ‹and of course they were lovely but I was impatient for you.
Nowhere -- you were nowhere, river.
 
I miss you and your undulating call of breaking against my stone steps;
I miss you when you were wild and wanting a little more
living space after a hard rain, rising past the banks and into the streets.
I miss the hissing foam of your edges, the reflections of sky that span and bend
with each of your curves.
I miss how purposefully you move in the same direction --
sometimes with ease, sometimes angrily --
but you're always moving, knowing where you're going.
 
I hear the cicadas, yes, their song swelling and fading
in their deep hiding places.
Even in the city they can fester and populate each spare backyard.
But you, river: we have stopped you, we have hoarded you away;
 
our industry has supplanted your sweet calm with an unnatural pitch.
We've shadowed you, and forced you into exile,
forgetting how to wade in instead of living from a distance,
how to cast our line and let you
cast our fate.

Reading About Her Losses
‹for Anna Akhmatova

It helps knowing grief isn't new --
it's being felt a continent away,
perhaps even in another history,
and yet grief lapses for no one
to deliver its fragile empathy.
 
I've never waited in prison lines,
nor felt their hovering Eastern chill,
but I've cried to an absent god
for many long-wintered summers
waiting for the right touch of one.
 
Your words are intercession
for the both of us -- I know well
the inviolable shame you carry.
Your words give me one mission:
to let the sea's direction absorb me,
 
to go under your tide of pain
and drift toward the secret chapel
of your imagination -- a place empty
of lovers and their earthly claims
over our once casually-made vows.

world without end

Five minutes near Luxembourg
 
and I woke to Ohio,
to light beyond my curtains
mentioning rain.
 
You send me.
You send me anywhere.
Your candle burns
in the corner and saturates my room
and I dance across continents.
 
We'll sleep in
and wake up
and really be
where I thought we were.

© All Copyright, Amy McDonald
All Rights Reserved. Printed By Permission.