WATER IN DREAMS

2016
Ed Bok Lee

How to love like water loves               
when it’s impossible to even taste
all the ghostly sediments                     
each time you take a sip

Impossible to savor    
the salt in your blood
the light and island shorelines
in each living cell    
 
When even the plainest mouthful
tastes more of you than you of it
    
Sweetest of absences
that frees in wave after wave
debris of thought like the dead,
the drowned, the vanished, and yet
sails your lips
on a voyage toward another’s, plying
all luck and regret

Worship, splash, guzzle, or forget
It clears any difference
Stone washer and mountain dissolver
that will
outlive us, even the memory of
all any eyes touched

Wasp and cactus in a desert
Comet through outer space
Sleep among all the cloud-shepherds’ children
 
A love so perpetually current
it doesn’t care that you love
without even knowing you love
what you couldn’t survive
three days without
 
How to love like that: wild
dream-sparkler and inmost virtuoso  
of every snowflake

Wise, ebullient, and generous
as the rain
Deepest of miracles 
for a time
borrowing and replenishing
a self
overflowing with fate.