Here is one of the poems I read Saturday at the reading:

 

In This Syntax of Water

 

A swell of green

I slip below

into the dreamworld of history

the anthropology of my being

 

I am the grinning fish

who is my ancestor

I swim

in a dreamland

of consciousness

 

I thought (before) I couldn’t breathe here

thought I was a land animal

thought myself a lumbering beast

bound by the rising light at my back

the blackness in front of me

I walked (this beast)

the curve of the earth

like a striped prisoner dragging chains

 

But now I am sleek as a seal

no longer on two planes

but three

I twirl and play

light and with light and of light

 

In this syntax of water

all things are connected

up is south

and I am my mother

and my grandmother

I am the ooze of sand

and the history of blood