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. White 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, 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 moose 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.
by Barbara Spring
