BPR 50 | 2023
—for Lise Goett
The eiders fly wedge patterns over the creek
while their kin V the water
and two side-by-side trail a W,
you and you. Where’s me? I’d like to be
necklaced in their teal-green neck rings.
And the ellipses between the ripples?
Silences, lapses. My torso smiles twice when I sit,
a rippling I am. I tell you,
my friend, and the air oscillates
the telling, like a cloud’s fish scales,
which resemble certain roof tiles meant to resemble
scales. Are they reptilian
or piscine? Interlaid, they look
like waves. The dogwood’s limbs wave at it.
Wind tells them to. So many are telling and told
you’d think bells were tonguing
the telling, the metal domes rippling, a vibrato
we can’t see. If there were a bell it would be
pigeon gray without emerald green,
iridescent neck rings—a sad lack.
The Appalachian greens try
to make up for it, ranges of them,
waves scaling the ridge.
A girl, I used to roll the lawn,
arms over my head, horizontal
ballerina, then lie face-up, my legs
spread to the sky. That’s how light
waves got in me, and the sounds
I hear waving, sometimes in trees,
sometimes the sea.
My heart skips a beat now, another.
Rain welts and winds down the window—
water snakes. Each ends in a bead,
a prayer. You can almost see
the beads sliding through:
the snakes have eaten the prayers.
My stomach ripples as I ruminate the rain.