Influence, Or

 

Influence, Or 

Something Like It

I have begun to think of life as a series of ripples 

widening out from an original center. 

                                                Seamus Heaney

Pinned & welded to the thin metal pole,

the birdbath’s bowl holds only enough rain-

or hose water for our few wrens & robins &

song sparrows.  On days it's dry: a caravan 

of ants.  Lately, like today, a thin scrim of pollen 

water a southeast wind ripples.  Her motley yellows, 

her blondes of a lot of hues.  It's imbued, if you were 

to stop at just this certain spot, at just this certain time

of day, by the roofline’s gable, her New 

England pitch reflected in the basin’s stationed

rain.  Once a hawk watched me there & then flew

off.  I only saw it shade the water, briefly blot

 

the sky.  & once a kit of pigeons lift, beak flick,

to dip their small noggins to their peculiar

music of coos.  Only ever briefly slack, the water's

often  rhythmed,  cautioned by all those log trucks 

hauling their bed of pulpwood to the paper

mill that ripples a sometimes windless surface.  

It’s when the distant bridge shakes, it’s when

the reverberation is both airborne

and underground undertow, you know? When

it mingles with what the ground makes

shake: the sway of the bridge, her columns

 

of rebar and concrete plunged deep beneath

the river, how she receives & then delegates

the weight & seeming seismic waves reawakening

commitments in the shifting granite we stand on,

or the boundary walls we make that are taken

down by the constant shaking (recall what Frost

 

said about all that mending). Sometimes

the birdbath bottom is sand dry, the water being

called back the way water is called back

and then filling the bowl to the rim, I watch the slow 

garden hose nose the duff,  float it a while, saturate it

cause it, while I'm looking someplace else, to over-

flow into the lupines that are pulsing to seed and rooting 

deeper for next season, and the season after that.