Ogallala Aquifer
As the water table sinks
mid-range rivers falter.
The Arkansas River loses its way
to Wichita. The Smoky Hill
lapses into gravel
and long stretches of silence,
like Heraclitus, muffled,
only fragments remaining
from his distant writings.
Or Sappho—her broken
songs are beds of old lakes,
just the outlines visible
like wheel ruts
of the Oregon Trail,
almost imaginary traces
across grasslands.
These river beds make roads
out of smoke-blue hills.
Cobbles follow and sand.
Far underground
the Ogallala aquifer,
a lost Ice Age sea,
dries into solid stone.
(New and Selected Poems)
Inside the River
Spring rains rushed beyond this spot,
changing sand into petrified waves
and sudden drop-offs
dug back at angles into sift river belly,
the random deep holes of whiskered catfish.
Springtime is stopped here in grainy patterns
interrupted only by a few heron tracks
and framed singularly in the ripples:
fragments of bisque crockery, skeet traps,
whiskey bottles—stories from western counties
all carried into the current,
spun around, broken apart, and suddenly found
years later, miles away, downriver.
(New and Selected Poems)
Starwater
Nursing my first baby
I drank eight glasses of water,
two quarts each day. He grew.
I felt like a carrier for water,
passing it on through to the child,
and some day his child, too,
will fatten, remarkable
like peaches and muskmelons
leaching juice from bare dirt.
Astronomers tell us star dust
once swirled together,
cooled into rocks and water
and still circulates,
the same matter pulled into stars
and Earth and into our flesh.
So water travels the skies,
stretches into clouds,
and falls, moving ever East,
circling, the same ancient water
caught in the whirlwind
binding us all together—
gravity, or maybe
as we know it, love,
or water drawing together all its kin.
(Starwater, reprinted in New and Selected Poems)
© 2017 Denise Low all text. Email for reprint permission kansaspoetry@gmail.com
Low, Denise. New and Selected Poems. Penthe Press, available online.
Low, Denise. Starwater. Cottonwood Review Press.
Music Precious Water from Water Drops. Stephen Gilbert and Paolo Gambino.
