Water Verses

“You cannot drink poetry,”

Points out Natalie Diaz.

No, not like river water

You can’t, and I think rivers,

Their desert necessity,

Our brutish exploitation,

Especially recently,

The losses of her people,

Were what she, the poet, meant.

Poetry’s no substitute.

No, it isn’t. But you can,

I think, drink it, in a sense,

And you can suffer the loss

Of poetry like water,

If not quite so suddenly.

A mind without poetry

Is maybe dehydrated?

It dries up. It’s not liquid.

It has words, but not for it,

Not phrases it remembers

As rhythms when the river,

After thunderstorms, rises

In flash floods that remind mind—

Water’s not ours. We’re water’s.