For Rebekah, the poet

Christopher Tower

While I read your poems,
your words
slick the inside of my head,
like water rings from stone's throw.

As I read, I feel the same way I do as when silky rain
that coasts through sky
and touches my face.
It's like the edges of leaves
that delicately scratch my skin as I pass through a thicket.These feelings move something within me
with more force than stone.

And after reading your poems,
I cannot find sleep.
I hear stone falling on stone,
first one,
then another,
then an entire hill
as it fills a ravine,
thousands of flat, round stones,
smoothed and darkened
by time that never passes
but surrounds us, waiting.

And I want to echo back
the spell of your language,
but I cannot capture the ten thousand
things that it is.

My head fills with fevers
of wild flowers,
congesting with the smells of ditches
clinging to the back of my throat,
remaining,like the last kiss before a departure.

After reading your poems,
I know the sounds hollowing out their homes in the dark;
I know the time the rose
needs to sing itself open;
I know the name of the truth.