Cinclus mexicanus (poem)

Cinclus mexicanus

© Kim Goldberg 2014 

Sometimes, when it is all too much,
too great a tonnage to transport, too many tasks
undone, conversations unfinished, relationships
abandoned, expectations pressing on my twig-sprung
chest like a pile of bricks, when every thought of duty
unmet propagates three more, when the dream of
the tiny house on wheels, of the life without facebook,
of days spent wandering through long grass, when it all
grows dim and distant as the shadow of a passion
lost, 

it is at times like this that I imagine myself
a dipper striding along the stony bottom of a rushing
stream. For this is how the dipper lives and
sustains itself—a bird no bigger than your fist,
foraging the crevices of the river’s rocky floor for
caddisfly larvae and other soft packets of flesh
while the water smashes past forever,
stripping away all clingfasts, all the mistaken
thought-experiments on the time-space continuum.
I tuck my head against the pummel and march
into existence, searching for plump morsels, letting
the river pressure-wash me until there is nothing
left but what I arrived with: feather, bone,
a tiny beating heart.

American Dipper (Cinclus mexicanus) Source: US Fish & Wildlife Service