Living Waters
The north
woods ring—the waters gather dripping from the tops of pines, running, running,
running over ancient rocks. The veerys
trill up and down the scales, the warblers chime their notes through still bare
twigs and the water runs, it runs down to Lake Superior swirling downstream,
plunging over waterfalls just freed from ice curtains. Curious deer come to drink from the pool
below lifting their heads, standing motionless to sense the air. Is it bear?
Wolf? Lynx?
Sun dapples
down through bare forest trees—sun streams, the ground steams, wet leaves tilt
insisting on light, thrust new spikes.
Water flows through mobile root hairs, roots, stems, vaporizes into air.
Wild geese weave the wind, skid
along black marsh water among tangles of cat tail. Further downstream waves curl onto a rock
shore polishing stones to oval and the small stones roll chinking and
chunking. They assume their flat round
shapes over years of grinding, finding their ease in the wave rhythms, rolling
rolling, rolling. While caps bubble foam
and the jade water is a dancing goddess in the middle distance between shore
and horizon.
Children arrive to pick up fossils
of ancient coral and to find stones to skip on a quiet day. They chase sea gulls and try to become airborne
by leaping and spreading their arms.
Cormorants and sooty terns rise and cleave the air. The red cheeked kids leap in the early spring
breezes, their knuckles chapped. What do
they care?
The bones of whales and sailors
roll in the currents—some finding their way out to sea, some becoming,
becoming, becoming a diatom’s shining, becoming the bones of an emerald shiner,
becoming limestone shale in the loving exchange between the living and the
living. The islands of Lake Superior
bear greenstones and jewel like snakes.
Sturgeon and trout spawn leaving pearls and coral in the crevices of
rocks. A moose stands chin deep in and
island lake. The islands of Lake
Superior are quiet, remote and cold, bereft of copper, littered with bones.
Curled underground, water drawn up
through squeaky pumps splashes into enamel buckets—water clear and cold and
tasting of iron. The iron flows through
the veins of the moos and in the red cheeked children.
Loons quiver their greetings and as
twilight falls, bullfrogs groan their love songs—they bellow all night
long. I lay awake listening to the water
lapping the night and its creatures.
--Barbara Spring
