LINDA H.Y. HEGLAND

Seek your small, bare rhythm

inside the thrumming cadence

of wind, and water,

birdsong, and quivering fish.

             Listen to the feat of becoming. 

 

How it first whispers 

in the shell held to your ear,

then gorges with booming water rush,

or the crack of storm-pitched trees,

            or the shuffle of plunging snow.

 

Our conversations, then, could be like that of birds

as they scud from branch to branch in the forest.

Call and echo. Co-creation. 

Offering quavers and intimate overtures.

             You to me; me to you. 

 

Or like river murmur,

fervent bank-enclosed susurration;

the flowing of words, and silences

in that wet, ecstatic place between shores. 

Or like the tone of transmutation in the 

             blushing turn of autumn leaves. 

 

Listen to the bruised sighs of those leaves as they fall;

to what the river rumours and what the sky imagines.

Listen, listen, to our own hungry, fierce throb – 

             the tremble, the flutter.

 

But listen to my graceless heart,

in those very places where I am defenseless, 

and the owl is enigmatic. Recalls secrets.

Where there is a door that is un-shut,

and a window where the view is luminous.

             Where we bear witness, the otter and I, each to the other.