Donum Aquae
After days of rain
the clouds are made
arable and now, in
sunlit splatter, they
most resemble a king-
fisher’s conspicuous
plumage of pale citrus
buried in blue, as it
descends from the
shadows of the lower
boughs into still water
leaving a faint ruffle
of glistening light.
In the Atacama Desert,
some claim that rainfall
has never been recorded.
How raw and immense
the silence must be and
the longing for gradations
of grain in something other
than honey gold or russet –
the mica-bright flecks
of an endless sea that
once, perhaps, cradled
water but now sleeps as
a vast body of sediment
without surf or cadence
bleeding out to the far
horizon where variations
in sound or hues are things
the landscape is forever
working towards and
that the star-thick heavens
withhold in dark abundance.
John Muro