Water Sounding Words
Water Sounding Words
I don't know you
on this day, now
under a sky so blue
you know this place isn’t always this
way; this pond sometimes has no lilies
and so I know what it means to forget
what it means to remember and
how a single flower becomes you
how the water is
right there, how
shallow the light becomes near dusk still, the sun, its
reflection
across this calm
water sounding words
invites the memory, not as awakening
just as one loving
the invitation of light
the equivalency of projection
of how we saw pinks like this ten years ago
of how you placed your finger into that yellow
as though to pull yourself to a different horizon
so far beyond that exhaustion
to a place sensing as a water lily knowing
when to close, to open
It was a morning of pervasive pink. The color urged me on. The magenta ironweed on the mountainside held my attention under a rare blue sky. And then it was this, this water lily, petals so strongly opened toward the sun, that drew me to my mother and a moment at the end of her life when she, once again, found respite in feeling the heart of a flower.