Emergence
Rivers in the winds and overcast greys focus into doves,
condense out of sighs and pearl dust.
Pool chairs loll out their pillows, blue tongues,
evidence that energy organizes new life
as water braids above rocks out of speed and enthusiasm:
new forms from eagerness and rush, just as history
preserves a name. Wallingford says there was a river
where oxygen and wagons might pass.
Nothing dishevels a thing like water.
It makes and unmakes innumerable existences.
Dustbirds and skyscrapers reconvene when the wind lessens
and water remembers homesick by its arroyos.
We too become bones and dry channels, eyes washed away.
White fossil swirls like limestone scoured to femurs, hands gravel,
the remembrance of water by rock, graceful, erosive,
severely delivered.
by Allan Peterson
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I love the line ‘Nothing dishevels a thing like water’. Brilliant way of putting it.
A dense poem that needed a lot of unpicking, yet enough came through on first reading and there is real pleasure to be gained from the language. More like this, please.
“Nothing dishevels a thing like water” would make an excellent first line. It instantly seduces the reader, unlike the the clotted flow of some of the lines here. Oh, to see this revised!