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, this thin scrim of pollen-water

a southeast wind ripples.  Her motley yellows, 

her blondes of a lot of hues.  Cirrus clouds

in a bowl.  At times, at just this certain spot, at just  

this time of day, the roofline’s gable, her specific New 

England pitch, is reflected in the basin’s stationed

rain.  Once a hawk watched me there & then flew

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

 

the sky.  & once a kit of pigeons lift, beaks 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 makes the ground

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 so

filling the bowl to the rim again, I watch the slow 

garden hose nose the floating duff,  then 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.

                                                                                                s. lee