The Water Artist

Up there, where the bare trees
ink their bones on the snow
and fragile ice — the kind that seems
to gasp when you step on it —
seals up the puddles
up there you can see her.
She'll be standing by the pond,
feathering the water with a twiggy branch
so the ripples spread
from a hundred points at once;
or lobbing in a big round rock
that breaks the surface with an oiled gloop,
slaps waves against the banks.

But be careful: she is easier to find
than she is to leave.
The boys who come to mock her
— twigs and stones, mad old crone, mad old crone —
end up staying longer than they meant to
watching the circles grow and intersect
beginning to see the shapes of clouds
the growth of trees
themselves.

And the married couples who pass that way
on their Sunday morning stroll
always say they'll offer her
hot food, stern words, safe walls;
then always give her nothing
but minutes, minutes.

A crow bursts from the trees and flaps overhead;
an arc of gravel patters across the pond.
A siren floats up from the highway;
one hand stirs a whirlpool
while the other lays a crosshatch
of fine and fading lines.
The pain returns to her side;
the pond goes still, unclouded.

Sometimes — when her knuckles freeze
in her fingerless gloves
when the fur of frost on a blade of grass
seems to contain all thoughts
all forms, all codes — sometimes
she wonders why she bothers.
Why she still listens for
the secret calls of things to themselves.
she knows they will not cease to be
without her interception,
that the world unwatched is not undone;
but like a fly that spins a spider's web
she is held by threads of her construction
that are not hers
that link all things
or rather link the ghosts of things
that haunt her thoughts
that — silvered as a porchlit moth —
flit from perception to reaction
and are gone.

Tell her this and she'll laugh.
Webs and ghosts, she'll say
can't hold sticks in the bitter cold,
can't grub up stones, can't make them
skip like songs across the pond,
can't fight the freezing rain
for a pattern on the water
that reflects its hissing, dimpled skin
and yet transcends it
redefines it.

Nor would she want them to.

The ice in her bones
and the fire in her brain
— trying, rejecting, refining, despairing —
are all that keep her sane.
All that free her from the coming spring
and the singing birds,
from the life that will bud and
Swell and burst again,
Waking
Without her.