It takes 500 years for the ocean’s waters
to complete one trip around the earth.
National Geographic Society
The prodigal returned, a bride running late,
it races from the street,
climbs the plumbing in the walls
to the bathroom tap, then halts.
Water is weather. Pulled from swells
out where cyclones make the only news,
its vapor ladders latitudes to the pole,
refreshes bergy bits, brash ice, floes––
or crosses longitudes to fall
as shoures soote upon us all,
then drain away to aquifer.
Weather is God’s will writ small.
Water is extended metaphor:
Its antecedent, alchemic character
commonly denominates
all things, in compound or by temperature.
4 a.m. Fill the glass.
Let the molecule from Christ
stand again in human state
even as it quenches thirst.
John Barr/Innisfree Poetry Journal
