Convergences

She hears with dread the repulsive wave’s approach

and her fifty-year-old body smothers under water.

An old man loses half his weight, as if by stealth,

but finds in his shed his great-grandfather’s knobbly cane,

and hobbles toward youth beside the pond’s swart water.

She listens to the dun-colored whippoorwill’s

three-beat before dawn, and again when dusk

enters the cornfield parched and wanting water.

He imagines but cannot bring himself to believe

that the dead woman enters his house disguised

or that the young rabbi made vin rouge from water.

Within the poem he and she—hot, cold, and luke—

converge into flesh of vowels and consonant bones

or into uncanny affection of earth for water.