I am a pattern of currents, each a chord twisting an imprint
in the sand. What I do is movement, sometimes the swiftest
floodwater, other times a slow curling eddy—the kind fish,
thick and slick and full of shadows live entire lives within.
I am strands of rivers, streamers of evaporation, the heavy
etchings of monsoons—always this need to hum with energy,
always this desire to reflect light as diamonds, as stars,
to bounce and refract it, to mirror each ray as if it were mine.
Don’t attempt to read my record in the mud and sand—
what you touch there is only what I had once felt. In this
way I am so temporary and fortunate to leave an impression,
but I am also gone, moving away, following the call of gravity,
like a siren’s hymn, it sings to my molecules, it knows my surface tension and I, I am my best when I feed and am fed by the earth.
J. P. Dancing Bear is editor for the American Poetry Journal and Dream Horse Press. He is the author of fourteen collections of poetry, most recently, Cephalopodic (Glass Lyre Press, 2015), and Love is a Burning Building (FutureCycle Press, 2014). His work has appeared or will shortly in American Literary Review, Crazyhorse, DIAGRAM and elsewhere.