"JACOB'S LADDER"
Copyright 2006 by ARLENE NESBITT

Vela Aquae

A poem by George Amabile

                for Tracy Jager

I tell myself, don't make a sound.
The river is asleep in its glistening skin
of lights, and all the sails are furled.

This is the hour of transparency,
a gift wrapped in veils of moonlight,
veils of air, a gift that cannot be returned,

or opened like vivid memories
of birdsong or desire. Only stillness
can unlock its tai chi auroras,

night scarves whispering the near
-ly inaudible music of butterfly wings,
the way light shifts in a backwater eddy,

the way the lift of a wave can change
the shape of the sky. Water has many voices.
They speak most clearly in the dark.

They are inside us, a rhythmic sentence
without end, that knowledge we have
sometimes, of being here and flowing away

through shadows into sunlit recognition:
that what we were and have lost
can return without warning—the way love

surprises an overcast afternoon—that everything
we have forgotten continues to dance
like deep sea ripples in deep sea light.

Nothing is only itself. Look at a leaf:
there are the branching veins
of tributaries, a river system, the tree

of blood in our hands that flows from a source
deeper than the languages that split and split
from the first word no one remembers.

We are veils of water, mist
rising from a morning lake, and as we speak
to each other with more and more ease,

we begin to see: the river
and the sea: lights coming on
in the mind: sails crossing:

and what you think is what I thought,
or dreamed once, as a shadow
that shrugs off its dusty coat and stands, shining

now, where veils of air and veils of water clear
then fade into the cool dusk of summer,
into its fireflies and stars.

Copyright 2006 by George Amabile