© Rock Salt Plum, 2003-2007. All Rights Reserved. Copying, digital retrieval, or transfer in any form (other than for personal reading or viewing), is strictly prohibited unless authorized.
It's been a dry period.
Sitting in Starbucks,
my ears travel out
in search of something.
At this age,
I can still hear things,
but may not always hear them right.
For example,
that man exiting with a drink
and a friend:
I suspect he really said "potable water."
But, right or wrong, it's out there,
and I drink it in, so to speak,
feel the sound
tickle the ears, the throat, the fancy,
as it goes down fine.
On reflection, though,
I have to admit there's nothing too exceptional
about audible water.
Maybe I'm really here today --
if at all --
to provide a voice
to inaudible water.
It's always there,
that murmur under every conversation,
untapped message pooled in every eye.
But where did I get permission
to speak for all the still waters?
And, if this ventriloquist falls in the forest,
will any of the trees
stop sipping from their own deep waters
long enough to hear me go?
My poetry, prose poetry, and fiction has appeared in periodicals that
include Rolling Stone, The Christian Science Monitor, Yankee, Prairie Schooner,
and Chelsea, and in a number of anthologies that include Imperial Messages
(Avon), Poems One Line & Longer (Grossman), Best SF:1974 (Bobbs-Merrill), 100 Great Science Fiction Short Short Stories (Doubleday), and The Poetry Train: A Collection of North American Prose Poetry (New Rivers Press). I have also received an NEA creative writing fellowship. My latest poetry collection is The Bird at the End of the Universe (TM Press).
