Habitation of Wonder. Abigail Carroll

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СКАЧАТЬ waiting,

      the way hawks

      refuse to apologize

      for flight.

      To let in the light

      like earth lets in

      the shining prophecies

      of rain,

      like monarchs

      let summer dance

      gold on the open invitation

      of their wings.

      To brother the wind.

      Not to choose between

      tomorrow and today.

      Not to refuse the liturgies

      of the waves,

      the rhetoric

      of the glittering sun

      spilt.

      To be undone.

      To note the descant

      of a cloud, a cormorant,

      tree crickets’ hum,

      the signature

      of glaciers scrawled

      on lichen rock.

      To defer to the willow.

      Not to prefer ignorance

      to the theories of swallows,

      the languages of the air.

      To enter the concert,

      the stirring,

      the singing,

      the way the bulrush enters

      its blooming,

      the way sky enters

      the glow of evening,

      the green-turning-flame

      of its song.

      The Calling

      And so it is, the lake is calling you,

      dropping in your ear the small consonants

      of its lapping. There is no resisting.

      It insists on shivering water into light.

      You have beheld this silver before.

      In dreams, it’s the radiance you wear.

      The jangle of shroud against mast:

      a language you have come to understand.

      It has let you in on its secret. So too

      has the dark slipping by of the cormorant.

      Soft, the verbiage of a passing

      kayak, the lisp of the paddle’s dip and rise,

      the narrow body’s thin blue glide.

      A word has perched on your tongue, but

      refuses to be formed, tastes like

      storm-rinsed sky, the wind-downed

      rhetoric of pines imitating the slow dance

      of waves. Acquainted with all manner of

      waiting, the dock grows patient

      with your sitting, your staring, your curious

      forward-leaning. Listen: water

      tapping, pulling at the hull, the metal siding

      on the plank-wood pier. It circles out

      from your dangling ankles, a shimmering

      map of echoes, farther, farther—one

      rippled articulation after another. The lake

      is a mirror, a question you cannot answer—

      yet one you choose to enter.

      Make Me River

      Make me river, cold

      with mountain, green

      with quiver, silver in

      the run and churn of

      winter leaving, valley

      waking, sheet moss

      breathing. Make me

      flash of mica, drift of

      foam. O Lord of flux,

      make these dry bones

      flow, teach me to spill,

      pool, glide, fall, tutor me

      to long for depth, seek

      downward paths, indwell

      the low. Oh teach me

      liturgy of keel, swirl,

      flume, the breaking into

      mist, the pull, the press,

      the song. Oh form me

      into blood of bedrock,

      quest of glacier, dream

      of sea, release me, set

      me free to course, surge,

      pour, sweep, issue, eddy,

      shower, plummet, roll.

      O Lord of flood, O Lord

      of spray, unstill my soul.

      The Way A Fish

      The way a fish

      moves through water,

      through light, the way light

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