Since I don’t know how to reply to all four of you, I am commenting to you here , Michael. I was inspired today to finish a poem I’ve been working on, and even though it may go through a few more edits, it feels very much like a thankyou/repy to your invisible worlds cafe explorations.
Secret Water
for Michael, John, Marco, Doug
Millennia of snowfall and snowmelt
still flow underground through desert land—
Mojave, Black Rock, Painted, Petrified,
Sonoran, Chihuahuan, Great Basin —
unreachable deep in alluvial bedrock
under Nevada, Arizona and New Mexico…
sometimes I can hear water’s regional
dialects, faint burble of water-tongues
resembling birdsong or spirits…
Sometimes audible creeks rush up fretwork
of cottonwood and juniper, exhale
rainclouds breaking up, water-falling.
Sometimes we dance the water-dance
the whirl of infinitesimal seas—H and O
a hundred sextillion molecules do-si-do
millions of times every moment—
and in our own limbs, fossil waters—
so old they quenched the thirst of lizard-birds
and legged-serpents and dawn horses, alive
and dying before we were born— feel
how water moves mind over tree-skin
or pixels of color, how we speak
even when we are only water
again—and air and earth and fire.