What has Water Washed Away

and aggrieved – are choking, numbing. Borrow pits
multiply for digging out clay to make and remake again
the levee walls, incarcerating the living river itself, so
that instead of spreading broad and confident across
the land, it tunnels, narrow and deep, 150 feet down.
Ships could sit sunk at its bottom and you’d never even
know it.
And think – my hands. Are they machines? Are they
prayers?
***
Some notes about change: Though we so resist it,
change is inextricable from living. Could we shift some
mental structure so that change felt peaceful, restful,
expected? So that we looked upon ourselves knowingly
as beings of change, living lives cut from the cloth of
change? Surely this could prepare us just a bit better,
with climate change looming, with all the terrifying
changes barreling toward us. Jesse mulled over this.
When a person has to live bed-ridden, deprived of
mobility, they develop bed-sores that ooze. The body
is not built to stay still! Each body is and desires to be
a body in motion, a body in change. I consider. Oh
how we try and we long for and we grasp at figuring
things out, sealing the deals, writing the endings. We
have stiff skin, dense chaotic minds. But: the shape
of practice then emerges. Practice is effort toward
resolution and endings and answers and meaning
transformed into a moving fluid. Oh rain. Practice is
rhythm. Oh holy vapors. Practice is the appropriate
way to try things as a human.
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