TRIBUTARIES

(originally written in 1981, revised a few times in the late 1980s, and again today when I found it in a pile of papers)

Water, I wrote years ago

has great messages for me.

I hear the river voice, a low blue tumble

towards some goal too distant to discuss.

Meanwhile I stand like an impatient anchor

waiting for my father

downstream

checking the lines.

I reach into the flow, wet

my sleeve to the elbow. I watch

it slowly dry. I can feel it

the water has returned to the river now, I know.

From the mountains, the streams bring offerings

faithful to the power of the flow

as it reaches for the sea.

And the sea

I cannot even consider it

the feeling of being too large to hold yourself

in check, too wide to map your own girth

too deep, too dark

to even believe that boundaries exist.

For water, there is just more of the same

a question whose finish is lost somewhere

in the middle. I feel it caress

itself endlessly, the only lover it can ever know.

As for my father,

he is dead.

He drowned years ago.