A Drink of Water

painting by Neil Waldman

youth is flexible

 

A Drink of Water
When my nineteen-year-old son turns on the kitchen tap
and leans down over the sink and tilts his head sideways
to drink directly from the stream of cool water,
I think of my older brother, now almost ten years gone,
who used to do the same thing at that age;

and when he lifts his head back up and, satisfied,
wipes the water dripping from his cheek
with his shirtsleeve, it’s the same casual gesture
my brother used to make; and I don’t tell him
to use a glass, the way our father told my brother,

because I like remembering my brother
when he was young, decades before anything
went wrong, and I like the way my son
becomes a little more my brother for a moment
through this small habit born of a simple need,

which, natural and unprompted, ties them together
across the bounds of death, and across time…
as if the clear stream flowed between two worlds
and entered this one through the kitchen faucet,
my son and brother drinking the same water.

Jeffrey Harrison
anthologized in Healing the Divide:
Poems of Kindness and Connection
edited by James Crews

Split the reflection

painting by Neil Waldman

 

play God:

split the reflection

layer the birch trunks

under the fall leaves-

and above the dots of moonlit dapples

and the deep black ground

above the edge of blue water

and white trunks

diminishing dots of ghostly waving trunks

subdued orange reflections

blue shadows

and that deep black ground reflected at the bottom

another black hole of possibilities

 

What sleeps below in November?

painting by Neil Waldman

.

spotlight stars, moon, clouds

hills, mountains, coast, trees, sea, spires

energy’s reflections