He Lived For Water

all the world’s water roiled and crashed
over slick black rocks down cliffs of basalt
in map-less countries without borders or budgets,
he could see and taste the flow and spray everywhere
he looked, the utter effervescent fluidity of it on his face
and brown blowing hair, thick and damp like maple leaves
soaked in rain, drops of life fell onto his lapping hungry tongue,
goosebumps the size of tiny sand pebbles on the shore of his neck
and carved biceps and the roar, oh the roar of pure wild/
ness, of caribou stampeding along the angry river
towards their own oblivion

and only the creased scrap of photo an inch square at most
in the parka pocket of the girl he loved in school, her slender body
buried in the arid desert town Barstow, burning waterless Barstow,
where he’d held her pink hand happy, full of grace on hot
and tired streets, swore his undying boy love and escaped
after the funeral and dust coated the whole place
and then the dumbing numbness of duration--
a glacier of NOW unending on grief’s mountain,
only the scent and feel of water could eke out
these small solitary baptisms, these partial resurrections
from the icy cage of frozen feeling,
but liquid moments evaporated fast:

Cool rising mist dissolves in the glare and burn of unrelenting sun.

he learned again and again and again in the ephemeral
refreshing stream, these grateful distractions are forever torn
from time’s capsized dream, chewed, swallowed down
the rock strewn gullet, drunk and eaten
by famished death’s dried gluttonous greed,
he gorged liquid on these long starred nights,
truncated days of untreed drought.