Mercedes Lawry

Riverspeak


I went down to the water and the water was the river
and the water was green and swift, brightening
the rocks, the sifted moss, the deep sorrows
left by those who’d come down to wail or pray
or expel commotion.
Rivers speak in trills and babble and uncanny lyric.
Damselflies flick and sweep,
blue moments unencumbered.
I stood in the river and felt its breath.
The water arrived and departed, circling my ankles.
Only occasionally did it linger in a small pool,
ruffing the grainy sand. As trees become skeletal,
drifting leaves take passage and time
shrinks and stalls, muddles the past
with the strings of indigo clouds looped in the sky.

Quadrant of forest


punctuated by Oregon grape,
sword ferns and salal.
Heron holds time, wing-ruffle
over mud blue.
Osprey licks sky pierced by
fir and cedar and Sitka spruce.
Rivulets from spring rain
carry stones beyond the mossy log
where the salamander sleeps.

Mercedes Lawry is the author of Small Measures, which won the Vachel Lindsay Poetry Prize from Twelve Winters Press, and three chapbooks, the latest, In the Early Garden with Reason, which was selected by Molly Peacock for the 2018 WaterSedge Chapbook Contest. Her poetry has appeared in such journals as Poetry, Nimrod, and Prairie Schooner. Mercedes’s work has been nominated six times for a Pushcart Prize and her fiction was a semi-finalist in The Best Small Fictions 2016. Additionally, she’s published stories and poems for children. She lives in Seattle.