POEM

WATER COURSES

I followed you down by the water courses.

So wrote a poet many years ago

But not so far in the past,

When it was still possible to say such a thing

As water courses

And not know what it meant.

I heard you in ripples and felt your eddies.

No one today would speak that way,

But he was someone whose English

Was learned from a book,

A sacred text, and he meant brook

Or stream, where someone would fish

Or bathe, and where lovers met.

You lay beneath the currents as below the sky.

The language of his heart and soul was Hebrew

And when he tried another tongue,

A modern one, his heart was tied in knots,

His soul became unsure of itself,

For it is so much simpler in the ancient speech,

Fewer words, less grammar,

And far more implications

You can follow in the letters of silence.

Your shadow pressed upon the crystal sands.

Water courses means nothing today,

Nor even braes or floods or brooks,

The concept of our love is shallow,

Unclean by moonlight,

Unfair in the sun,

Raucous, public and brief,

Like our words and our syntax.

I dreamed you were there when the waters passed.

I envy that young man in Tel-Aviv

Who thought he could turn his naïve dreams

Into terms he found in a dictionary,

As though he could make old dreams live

By alluding to archaic words for streams

And brooks; no, he wasn’t reactionary.

He was too innocent.  I will forgive

His errors, for whatever his passion means

Flows by deeply and slowly.

I dip my fingers in the water course and feel your words.

Words carry

Their own history hidden their sounds

And appearance, not in their meanings.

Meanings may be found in undulating clouds

Not in the water courses,

On the echoes of the wind among the trees.

Long after they are no longer spoken

And their resonance has grown dry

As an ancient wadi’s path through the hills,

I dream your presence in the shape of things,

No longer language, no longer sense.

Only my eagerness to lie with you remains.

His eagerness was naïve, his words innocent

Of meaning, his love a lost impression

Like the original couple who danced

By the shores of a water course

And left their footprints, fossils now.

You whispered then and touched my soul.