Taking It

Taking It

The poet’s

task is simple

He looks for quiet,

and speaks to what

he finds there.

                                                David Whyte

                                                The Poet

While I slept yesterday I said the ocean takes

everything into it              is spilled river

and her thin varicose of streams come a long, often   

blocked, way from the density of trees    some bubbling

awake with the pulled up stones the ones who rose

with the tree one spring after a particularly

deep snow and painful thaw and they

a long long time of never exposed may

have been shocked by it all           so long

in the thick whipped black of earth:

dirt and roots.  See now can’t you

the easy-going press of an ambling coon,

whose hand on the inside cheek of this one

particular rock, that although stuck like grape-

shot, unlike all the rest this one took

to wanting to look step-on-able: soft

enough                 (though you know this means

smooth) to be a seat in the night and dark

enough unseen from such a height           a slight

body might wriggle and press into the hip

of it        the rock                and wash first

a hand and then maybe another hand and then

without knowing they have a solid refuge there

and they shake less         and less                and

less until she lets go herself and pushes through

the leaves into the night.

Imagine such a pew brought up through

to the thick of the mountain laurel, flaked

like flint and made smooth in the rain and winter

and sometimes wet sometimes dry decay

of the maples, some with long wide gashes

of rot across their trunk and where some

branches attach                                and the probing

beneath all this: a stone’s come through and is

the unknown crucible when the stream winds

through yes through to the sea still leagues

and leagues away                                             maybe

it gathers too what is sweet here

what is earth-sweat and heavy breath to hear

and having sat and then gone past

is not deaf a moment longer but undone

in a way it could never fathom: this water crossing

stone where sanctuary is always

granted where having come up from

the dark dreaded hair having the patience

to stay, to wait for rain to make the ice-berg curve

smooth and smooth and smooth for the few

who hide into her pelvic curve to exchange her name…

something for child’s frame or a Jacob face,

something to lay on for a long                    long     

and sleep, not shaking, not, finally, afraid.