…feet that go down in the mud where the truth is.
– William Stafford (“Spirit of Place: Great Blue Heron”)
If I learned nothing else from energetic Dr. Raymond Alf,
it was ‘pond wootah’, where microscopic cells of life form
from hydrogen, oxygen, nitrogen and carbon molecules
to attach and reattach in the stagnation, out of the mud
we crawled. He saw God in the bottom of the Grand Canyon
as a single cell, a fossilized drop in a hardened sea of mud.
We will go back to the that place and become unraveled
with the detritus of all our discarded poems, with all the love
that never materialized, mixed with the anger and hate
we may not have overcome, to start over years from now,
and so on. But what about the whole-soul of us
looking for a place to light, a familiar branch to rest and wait
for someone listening? Hawk or bear or bobcat even,
we become this place each time we leave, but always eager
to return, to reconnect with the spirit of this mud.
drycrikjournal 