Just as it is hard to eat just one potato chip, this morning it is hard to pause with just one poem. They keep coming to lead me through this day of fog and to open wands of sun. May we each find and feel our worth.
Marvin Bell
Dark Brow
The dark brow of the creek wrinkles over time
as if something had been born there.
Scavenging all night, the water that runs there
brings things from time past.
Some of these things are the wrappers, the coats,
of what it meant to say, "I tasted"
or "I felt." And this, whatever it is, is not that.
All of us have felt the fatigue of dark water,
the burden massed at yard's edge,
and in the line of the garden
beyond the onions, there are fresh tears.
I do not say we should live forever,
for who could bear it,
only that we should one day enter completely into life.
In the beginning, as at the end, there was nothing,
though "was" is the psychic's verb,
the one that proves the existence of a current
by rising after it has passed
and shaking its head furiously, spraying water.
"I was," we say. "Therefore, I am." We also believe
a piece of us has washed away and may be worth something.