What the Water Knows by Sam Hamill

Sam Hamill

What the Water Knows by Sam Hamill

T.

I keep having these dreams where I am asleep underwater. I’ve never known such peace. It calls to me so much, to make it happen. It scares me a little.

What the Water Knows

Sam Hamill

What the mouth sings, the soul must learn to forgive.

A rat’s as moral as a monk in the eyes of the real world.

Still, the heart is a river

pouring from itself, a river that cannot be crossed.

It opens on a bay

and turns back upon itself as the tide comes in,

it carries the cry of the loon and the salts

of the unutterably human.

A distant eagle enters the mouth of a river

salmon no longer run and his wide wings glide

upstream until he disappears

into the nothing from which he came. Only the thought remains.

Lacking the eagle’s cunning or the wisdom of the sparrow,

where shall I turn, drowning in sorrow?

Who will know what the trees know, the spidery patience

of young maple or what the willows confess?

Let me be water. The heart pours out in waves.

Listen to what the water says.

Wind, be a friend.

There’s nothing I couldn’t forgive.

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