By Zach Dankert
We watch the herons disembark Time just before the rain, imagining a missed god. A forgotten artist sculpting massasauga stripes, storm ripple gray, fish hunt blue. Apparatus hinged with a terrestrial curve around body of feathered water. Bird, body, old life reversed back into the black eye.
“We live many times on this earth,” you say, “each one a different purpose.”
I wonder whose purpose it is to grip grief, and whose is to let it all fall.
*
They plod out of the marsh, the wet-footed trees and thicket bushes. Remnant, architecture, civilization. Columns of alabaster evolving into dirt under my sole. These birds resemble gatekeepers. Human-length wings beat back the barrier between water and understanding, skirting the first thought of a sapien mind that is
we are kept afloat by an abundance of ghosts
there is an intake of breath as one almost descends upon our dock before spurning us.
*
Painted turtles watch protected by logs, bobbing in duckweed. Bullfrogs silent in mud, skin slick as the planet. Catfish pray to the subterranean, heads touching the wet lake’s lips. I didn’t realize we shared the same hymn until I recognized their trepidation.
*
With the sound of a man breaking (soft release of pleasure) rain burrows into the earth’s scent glands. It’s only an afterthought on the back of my neck and the muscles of my palm. Snared horizons under these streets and cities amass in the depressions of our footprints; dirt, femurs, our masks we’d forgotten to lay to rest. Great Blue Herons, monk-like in posture, don’t move out of the shower. If we live many lives, will I begin as predator, letting the droplets darken the chainmail of my deference?
Though it's not my place to dip my fingers in your grief, I’m suddenly sure this heron stilling the life around us is you, the same self regarding a translation of spirit.
*
These birds are the lullabies of historians.
*
Visible to every house barricading the lake, a host of herons wade talon-deep, watching the water for an apocalypse or a final Sabbath. The waves, I notice, are lapping backwards. A heron baptizes a fish with air and brings it to a new religion.
I don’t say anything, but I nod at your observation;
You, who shows me how to kill you over, over, and over again.
Zach Dankert is a poet and recent graduate from Hope College, where he studied English and Biology. Poetry is the medium through which he mixes creative writing with an interest in the planet, and he hopes his work may inspire a similar connectiveness in others. Zach lives in Cicero, IN.