Fearing Water

You fear
a day of swimming,

fear the river,
its brown blank face.

I, too.

Is it channels
we dread?

Marriage,
love.

That which draws us in or down,
that which has no hesitation.

For our brief time
we swim side by side

as if creatures with fins.
We keep our round eyes open.
Fear is the watery thing in which we live.

Even The Alphabet

Consider s
who stands beside another, close as possible,

c who will not abandon k at the end,
no matter how thick the attack,

q who breaks the trail for u, who without u
can hardly manage what is required--

and consider how letters live in the body,
play in it, against the back of the teeth,

in the wet active tongue,
and make the lips to part, to close.

Consider how necessary silence is,
coupled with constancy,

how silence can make a syllable benign,
so that it does not shout to show valor,

but softly stands in place
and changes everything,

as does k who, though it can speak,
kneels before n and says nothing, nothing.

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© Copyright, Marge Saiser .
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