my mother, a child, walks to the spring
and rubs her body with wet grasses.
she is taught, she learns
a scrubbing of detritus realm
from our barrier of selves.
the bending of wills and heads
has not yet led to pesticidal lathering.
my grandfather has not yet installed
the house’s waterways, aqua as bended will
and not will to enter, to bathe in no more than.
these waters from which direction
erupts, the cause for no such
words as north south east west
used in our village before—
there is only upstream, downstream.
this couplet all the world needs to know
of divining place and ways within it:
where to wash in a known rush of sluice,
what part of the earth to bring
to skins. how to gentle a renewal,
how to be smallness and cold, to begin.
