5

This morning before we met for coffee I was thinking
of my brother, and other who never made it to live the life 
they dreamed,
about our paths, the broken marriages, children we brought forth into
the world.
The Rio Grande where every day I meditate, taking not of the river's
ways,
seeking to learn its wisdom, its methods
the way it lets go, surrenders to each season
what it cherishes most, what makes its life and gives it color,
it releases like a huge loving mother
who
tears a part of her heart out
and offers her laugher and sadness to me
in a lofty sunflower or read leaf.

I was thinking of the Rio Grande as a pair of mother's hands, 
Not those hands that have 
Built cities or Olympian hands in
grueling gut-grunging competition
to be the best,
they are mere gnats in a starving mongrel's neck scruff;
but as I sat at the river
it unspun in me a vision of things to come:
from a Serbian leader accused of genocide,
a man choking off his soul to attain his ambitious ends,
carrying a million passengers to their destinations,
to a dark-skinned woman dancing the tango in Buenos Aires
like an insane butterfly in a tropical garden
in a salsa club where the ghosts of poets sit at tables and drink
the air as if it were the most savory liquor,
a Virginia field slumbering in red clay bliss,
woods echoing with frozen, creaking pine trunks
unable to endure their own height,
mountain boulders turning over slowly like bears awakening from hibernation,
sands in Utah bleeding white dirt
from the betrayals of nuclear waste dumped in them.

Meditating on the mother's hands,
the river in me sings my gratefulness to you and others,
how selfless the river is
when I stop to wonder at a million twigs strewn about the ground.
I am reduced in the river's presence
to a single note in this orchestra of forest trees,
my voice an unfolding tiny green leaf,
singing of my heart's changing river currents.

And I pray:
Let all my sensibilities be the breathworkings of this forest,
Let its quiet fire, the invisible tissues of its flame, enter me, bless me, re-molecule my DNA
to be more it than me,
to be more it than what I want
to be more it than what I desire
to be more it
than what I love,
and in all of that love,
let me rise as a tree,
a flower,
wild grass,
river shrubs and tangled brush.

I celebrate mother's hands,
shape-shifters that heal our wounds
and induce me to be as close to what this river is,
risk who I am in all I do to recreate me
molded in mother's river hands
there to embrace my frail strength
to push me forth, becoming more the river than myself…