Poetry by Will Walker, Summer 2015
*
Some days what’s best said is nothing. Do the dishes.
Let the water rushing from the kitchen tap
and spattering in your fifty-year-old white porcelain sink
be your soundtrack, tuneless music, an aqueous rat-a-tat
little snare drum of busy bubbling strict time running
on and on, telling you all about its full life, born
aboard a turbulent cumulus, accrued in the Sierra Nevada
in a hard, white winter attended by the tough mugs
of massive boulders and the ministrations of a forest
of firs, whole monkish colonies bearing witness
to snowmelt and trickle, a white field dissolving
into sedge and grass and wild orchids, a sea
of Indian paintbrush, phalanxes of forget-me-nots.
Then the deep absorbent meditation of earth,
and the engineered fugue of dam and pipes and valves,
followed by the burst of daylight and this happy exit down
a copper pipe, headed on a journey to begin again.
*
Will Walker lives in San Francisco with his wife, Valerie, and their dog. He is a former editor of the Haight Ashbury Journal. You can read more at http://www.erickentwines.com/pages/category.jsp?catid=212