Communion
I strip by the spillway,
taste dawn’s copper light
in the sweet-and-sour leaves
of the sorrel weed. Whitman’s beard
unravels in pond mist.
His voice rasps through cattails.
The night his words first flared
like sparks from the page, I said
to the dark: I, too,
will indenture myself to lightning;
I, too, will trace constellations
printed on the sky’s carbon paper.
Last night a drunk friend
blamed Whitman for lighting the torch
that guided planes into Manhattan’s towers.
This morning, Canada geese squawk
like talk-show hosts
before skidding into pond scum.
A crow pecks the rainbow
from a trout
gasping on the shore’s cracked mud.
A bass snaps at a dragonfly
suturing the air with blue thread, wings
shimmering like stained-glass splinters.
In the hush between waves,
the mist whispers:
I know they say I’m blind
as the cloud erasing itself
on water, as the moon
with its gray eye patch.
I know they say I can no longer shoot
sunlight out of me
against the sunlight breaking into me.
But I am and always will be
a sun roaming the streets, pressing
my ear to the lips of the dying,
gathering their last words
like a sparrow
picking seeds from dung.
Mist clears. A starling sways
on the top shoot of a white spruce,
scatters stars from its breast.
A muskrat slips from its hole
in the willow bank, unfurls
its signature on water.
The sun shuffles from the swamp behind me,
stamps a path with its boot soles
across the pond for anyone to follow. 
Contributor’s notes
The Angel of Death Knocks at the Door
Learning How to Meditate in Gowhar’s Plum Orchard