Milinda’s Questions

Been much too long since I’ve posted to this blog. No excuses now. This evening, while sorting through one of the numerous stacks of documents that litter my apartment, I ran across this poem. I wrote it in the summer of 1975, when I was 17, shortly after graduating from high school. To my obviously biased judgment, it stands up about as well as most adolescent productions do (unless you’re Rimbaud or Dave Davies); and since the WWW is presumably a slightly more public and permanent medium than the fading piece of paper I have it on, I thought I’d reproduce it here:

Embrace The Water

Embrace the water
Take it in your spindly arms
     and squeeze it to your breast
As it slips through your crippled fingers
Watch your shadow drip
And watch the clumps of dirt
     around your feet
     wash away.

Embrace the water
As it spreads in tiny droplets
     on the surface of the glass
Cup it in your hands
And swirl the colored pigments
     in the ash-laden mud
Smear it on your forehead
And toss away your hair.

Embrace the water
Feel it as it swells
     the hollow place inside your breast
And as it seeps into your desert skin
feel in pounding in your veins
And watch it all pour out
      upon the dried earth floor.

Embrace the water
Embrace the salty swirling eddies
     that skitter on spindly crab-legs
     from the pounding waves
Embrace the pavement-washing rivers
     and the puddles cased in glass
That slip through your stubborn toes.