Marco V Morelli reads Maia’s “Secret Water” in response to the 11/6 [2018] Cosmos Café thread on “Developing a Sense of Agency with Invisible Words.”

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Secret Water
for Michael, John, Marco, Doug

Millennia of snowfall and snowmelt
still flow underground through desert land—

Mojave, Black Rock, Painted, Petrified,
Sonoran, Chihuahuan, Great Basin —

unreachable deep in alluvial bedrock
under Nevada, Arizona and New Mexico…

sometimes I can hear water’s regional
dialects, faint burble of water-tongues

resembling birdsong or spirits…

Sometimes audible creeks rush up fretwork
of cottonwood and juniper, exhale

rainclouds breaking up, water-falling.

Sometimes we dance the water-dance
the whirl of infinitesimal seas—H and O

a hundred sextillion molecules do-si-do
millions of times every moment—

and in our own limbs, fossil waters—
so old they quenched the thirst of lizard-birds

and legged-serpents and dawn horses, alive
and dying before we were born— feel

how water moves mind over tree-skin
or pixels of color, how we speak

even when we are only water
again—and air and earth and fire.

—by Maia