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A Poem by J.P. Cedillo

I met you as a child encounters
for the first time the
brilliant sheets of sea

and later tries to explain it
to those who slake their thirst by
delivering their noses down
to cupped handfuls of rain.

You say: "A million times a million
times a million times" to the heavy
blinks.

When you are able to balance
a load on your back and
there is strength in the shoulders
you leave, a young man making
his way up the mountain snows.

You learn how the grasses are green ice
the trees are slippery as fish
the air catches fire in the lungs:

these lessons cost you a year.

You spend more years,
learn other things:
there are rocks in valleys
sands fill the deserts
and mountains, too, cup their hands
to drink.

Sometimes there are women
like cool round stones
to be fished up from the river shallows
to be held a moment and, when they
have wet your palm and you have
felt how they are curved and blent
you will return
to the flows which you know
fashion all stones
to dust.

You begin to follow the rivers. You watch
the land separate before the gray water like a
desperate pack of goats flee a wolf.

You watch them strike wildly against
the strangling root lines, watch them
spending all their prodigious strength
in the long search
for their brother water.

The night harries you.

Maybe the land is too long.
Maybe the water dries out ahead,
some unknown where, stretches out
under the sun and dies.
Maybe the life it bears dies as well, gets
buried under the silt of other life.

Maybe the sea tops have stopped their
playful curling on each other.
Maybe the waves no longer clutch at the land, again and again
and forever.
Maybe there are only deserts left.

Maybe you walk yourself mad.

--And yet, here is the morning
with small gifts: the red of the warming
sky, the notes that gingerly take the air
from a dozen hidden nests and always
always always
the call of your green bay.