Howard Firkin
I was the often dry creek in her catchment,
but when I ran, I fed her purling river
with everything of which I could be giver,
and she, unsated, wild, magnificent,
she pulsed with lightnings, flooded water flame.
The past belongs in badly folded maps,
arranged in layers, stored in drawers, and lost—
their ridges, valleys, borders never crossed
by fingers tracing paths of new perhaps,
new paths to find the destinations same.

The wild is tamed by accurate description,
and she remains a woman undefined,
a liquid thought, defying mere depiction;
she overwhelms my thought to flood my mind.