Nine Mile Creek, Lake Erie Watershed (Southern Basin), USA
- No time (all a-rush)…
- No time; here & there arranging, buying, doing, fixing, speaking…
- Where is the water that I can touch today? I have failed to notice properly…
- I forget my internal tides; I race on asphalt, smelling of urgency (road and body)…
- Annoyance, desire, fatigue…
- People jostling, striving, trying to fulfill something…
- Home again, bulk purchases to store — toilet paper, enormous bag of kidney beans…
- Dinner preparations; feeling the impossibility of practicing AS anything but chaos!
- And why not, then, let the whole damn thing fall down?!
- And why not, then, stand witness to what limits I place on the parsing of time?!
- How to prioritize when it is ALL to be done RIGHT NOW?!
- Alarm, alarm, alarm…
- See there, the sky is darkening, the news comes of an impending storm…
- Wind rising, trees bending, air smelling of wet from far away, rumbles overhead…
- Here it comes! The waters are coming! Down from above! DOWN FROM ABOVE!
- I looked for too long at the too low, seeking water’s message there…
- Here it comes! All a-thunder, wreaking torment out of trees’ whiplash bow-down!
- OH! OH! OH! SHEETS of water all a-streaming, cutting sideways, flushing the sky!
- In my body, electric rising of panic? joy? awe? Yes, indeed!
- My body is SHOUTING every hair on end! The rain is a river falling down!
- Below, in the flood plain, I know it is a wonder…
- Warnings of flash flooding so I go down to see, go down to find something…
- To see what asks to be seen…
- To ask, what wishes to be seen…
- Nine Mile Creek…it is RISING! OH! MY! GOD!
- Never so high have these eyes seen the waters flow in this place!
- Churning vortices of mud and flotsam; muddy bank-slivers knifed away by force…
- THINGS being carried away, away, away into the lake to the North…
- If I fall, if I fall into the waters, I will die in every way…
- The banks are too soft to bear my weight…
- My body is too soft to carry the waters if I should fall and open my mouth…
- If I should fall and swallow the torrents of meaning washing down from the sky…
- If I should fall and take into myself the human detritus carried by the waters…
- So, today I will not fall. I will not allow it. I will not give myself to this power (yet)…
- Today, I will watch, notice, witness, feel the implications of water all wild & free…
- Then, one day, fall into the ecstasy of vibrating in sympathy with the rising flood.
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