Poetry

One of the articles in Earth & Spirit (IC#24)
Originally published in Late Winter 1990 on page 34
Copyright (c)1990, 1997 by Context Institute

She must have dozed. For a moment
disoriented, unaware of how
she’d come to be floating.

Heading downstream, occasionally
the warm water would cascade
over her face and eyes.

Sunlight became liquid, and she
felt it reaching into her ears,
her lips. She could see molecules

of water and the molecules
of her body running together.
No longer her being carried by

the stream, she was the stream,
and the sun’s photons were tiny
explosions of feeling.

She became conscious of deep vibration,
a roar, and of moving more rapidly.
Her liquid body

shot over the lip
of a waterfall and off into space.
She broke into thousands of droplets,

each a point of ecstasy.
It was as though she were a sigh
of pleasure as she spread

into mist. Then something moved
through her. At millions
of intersections she assembled

a description, a form with two
leading edges, pointed center and
bulbous shape behind, with a forked

plane playing the turbulence: a swallow
was flying through her.
She knew then a loving the universe finds

in the swallow’s existence, the way
its sensual form becomes intimate
with damp air. Then

she felt water on her wings.