Arrowhead

Where two streams joined, we met

By accident, sitting upon an outcropping of rock

With only the intent of watching

Water flow beneath unwinding water.

Facing up-stream, she held a flower

To the sun as I leaned back and found

An arrowhead inside a crevice, which lay there

As if someone had left it by intent

As an excuse for me to speak above the whirl of water

Swirling upon stone and thus

Transform the accident of meeting her—

Ablaze in sunlight with a flower in her hand—

Into stark fact as obdurate as rock.

Could I have called, "Look at this arrowhead

I just found here!" Would she have thought

"An accident, that's credible,"

Or feared that my intent was sinister,

And that the implication of the arrowhead,

Unlike the radiant white flower or

The two streams merging into faster water,

Casting up colored spume,

Had been contrived by me, certain as rock

That forms by geologic laws?

She had to know an arrowhead

Is humanly designed with the intent to kill,

Though now it's harmless as a flower

Decorating someone's hair,

Or water organized into a garden fountain.

An arrowhead can now be used

As an adornment for a necklace

Like a flower in a painting where a stream

Leaps past a light-reflecting rock

With nothing in a brush-stroke left to accident.

And so our accidental meeting on the rock

Flowed by, a flower cast upon the water

With intent unknown, and all

That's left now is the arrowhead.