A Woman Contemplates The Water Cooler

 

Trapped in a glass lung,

water waits to be drawn
then sipped between gossip
and complaints.

Its spirit reduced

to these shared
ounces and hours
in an office

which should be

a stream or river
polishing stones, soaking through
tree roots and keeping
the earth cool

while fragments of former lives

lie embedded
among shoots of new growth.

My tendons are  stems

stretching , binding  movement
to wind and  light,
white pines and old world sparrows.

North Carolina

calls me back. Her breath
history deep, a hearth
exposed on a hill

where there’s enough

shards of clay and wood
 to comprise
the rattle’s shake for rain
or healing.

Where a woman stirred

pots and carved dolls
with a paring knife,

her fingers scented

with tea olive, limber
as the bark of a sapling.

I was not born there

but born of her.

Her ancestry ringed

around those joints
that let me travel
telling my bones

their song is the song

of the seeker, the wood wife
who sleeps on the ground
and listens for water --

the course of her next journey.