“Why blame yourself? Why blame yourself?” the liberal consolation of the anecdotal Vicar who's missed his birdie putt.

Who else shall I blame for this drought stricken life? My mother? My father? My brother? The world?

There is so little time. This is all the time I've got. This is mine, this small parcel of years, that threatens to spill over on to the pavement and be lost among careless feet. Lost. The water out of the sieve and the river run dry. The quietly contained sea where the waters don't break.

I want to run up the hill in the freedom of the wind and shout until the rains come. I call the rain with my head thrown back. Fill up my mouth, fill up my nostrils, soak the parched body, blood too thick to flow the channels. I will flow. Flow with summer grace along a crystal river. Flow salmon-flanked to the sea.

Why dry? Why dammed up when the hidden spring informs the pool? How to bore down to where the water is? How to cut an Artesian well through the jelly of my fear?

I blame myself for my part in my crime. Collusion in too little life, too little love. I blame myself. That done, I can forgive myself. Forgive the rotting days where the fruit fell and was not gathered. The waste sad time. Punishment enough. Enough to live wedged in by fear. Call the rain.

Call the rain. Drops of mercy that revive the burnt earth. Forgiveness that refills the droughted stream. The rain, in opaque sheets, falls at right-angles to the sea. Let me lean on the wall of rain, my legs at sea. It is giddy, this fluid geometry, the points, solids, surfaces and lines that must undergo change. I will no be what I was.

The rain transforms the water.

Jeanette Winterson, Art & Lies

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I am piecing a potion

To combat your poison

She is risen

She is risen

Boys

I said she is risen

- Tori Amos, Barons of Suburbia

.Lost.

Stand still. The trees ahead and bushes beside you

Are not lost. Wherever you are is called Here,

And you must treat it as a powerful stranger,

Must ask permission to know it and be known.

The forest breathes. Listen. It answers,

I have made this place around you,

If you leave it you may come back again, saying Here.

No two trees are the same to Raven.

No two branches are the same to Wren.

If what a tree or a bush does is lost on you,

You are surely lost. Stand still. The forest knows

Where you are. You must let it find you.

- David Wagoner

Grounded

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