I am listening to water,
to the music it makes, the lullaby
of falling without breaking.
I don’t know if water thinks
of safety, but I know it doesn’t stop
at the lip of the falls
and I wonder how to live
like that, when breakage
is what goes on here—
how to croon like a mother
while the cradle plunges
from the cracking bough.
That’s what I need to know—
now, right now, before falling
makes me mute—
how to sing in mid-air,
cry out the 99 names of God,
each one a drop of water
lit by the sun, each drop
in love with gravity and the sea.
I listen. I tune my heart to that key.