Rift-Design

Es eignet sich, es zeigt sich an, es warnt.

                     It owns itself, it shows itself, it warns.

                                                 --Goethe, Faust, Part II, Act V

   
What we missed in the small streams,

declivities by roadways bridged bank to bank

crossing waters with no name, no thought,

easy currents whispered and contained-- 

these harmless passings mere contours,

forgotten veins of watershed patterns

overlaid, what owned the earth first,

carvings we cannot read, evocations of design 

pronounced by rain undefining

sides now lost to passage,

helpless to cross reveals our confinement: 

indefinite closure suggests

damage is irreparable,

a concept we reject, incredulous. 

Protect your children from these waters:

floods that reveal, then vanish,

reclamations of dominance 

more than a single absence

when water withdraws as language

that never spoke: 

the father’s body surfaced later,

fourteen miles down.

Water should never surprise us:

in the language of small streams

floats the rhetoric of floods.

                                                                        Cheryl Emerson
                                                                                          July, 2013