Rock Pool

Water roared everywhere around us, yet from the bank

all we could see of it were quick spumes and flashes

here and there, in among the boulders. Cautiously,

as if they might awaken, we clambered over

the gigantic slabs and humps, the sun-baked ovals

lumpy as hammered clay, and saw downstream below us

only the vague shapes of others, almost billowy,

like magnified amoebas, stretching away to even

vaguer ones beyond them, turning the narrow

streambed through the valley to a lunar seam.

Easing ourselves down over the massive sides

(we were hot and tired, eager for the pools below)

we could make out older water in the rough grain,

undulating and immobile currents, band swirled on band,

mica-speckled, cloudy, each seeming to move off,

as it faded, through the stone—each one a glacial rune,

each boulder an innumerable pebble in the ice sheet’s

tidal suck and drag: two hundred thousand years,

two billion, five, the molten core, spoor

of gasses in the vast night, at our fingertips.

Then the pool: your clothes shed, with one hand braced

against the rock ledge you had slipped into the hip-high

rushing water, and were wading out, bent over, reaching

like the blind before you for the slippery boulder

you slid across, pushing against the white weight

of the pouring mist, your skin goose-fleshed, speckled

bright as mica, and then, part mist yourself,

you turned back, smiling, calling though I couldn’t

hear you, calling and waving for me to climb down

to where you were, to join you there. And so I did.

Source: Covenant (The University of Chicago Press, 1991)