Time to Touch It

Modernity is the refusal to be in touch.
—Bayo Akomolafe

A small glimpse from Watershed, a collection of poems about grief, kinship, witness, and return.

This poem, “Time to Touch It,” lives near the center of the book’s inquiry: what happens when grief can no longer remain distant, private, or abstract. 

What happens when we lend our tears back to the watershed?

Time to Touch It

beside the mountain creek
minding (mending) my own busi(y)ness

arriving empty
full of all the sick and stuck

more confusion in the numb little toe
than dare to admit

this unraveling has a slow descent
finding fog has a grip on time

silence pulls all into itself
even raven’s entrails go quiet

meals here are not sweet
but packed with minerals

all seems frozen but the southern sun
and the stream rehearsing thaw

in the water, a reflection—
whose face is it?

ash on skin
or skin on ash

out of the corner of the eye (soul)
tears inside stones

can barely allow the amount of grief (longing)
carried by the water (world)

it is following its promise to gravity
to flow into (out of) all the cracks and sacred swirls

offering a single Now—
rock-water-air-sound-ear-heart

and even mountain
is a cloud

from that whoosh—a knowing—
how separate we’ve made everything
how thing-like we’ve made everywho

how we’ve built a world
we keep saying we don’t want

so impossibly alone (together)

so, standing inside it,
the Source—clear and wet
reaching into the water
it was finally time to touch it—

hand to chest
chest to water

down below
stars in the water
and love—

all the unspent pain
still shimmering

no need to understand—

water is already moving through

If this watershed speaks to something in you, I’d be honored to place a copy in your hands.

Preorders include a signed paperback copy, the digital Companion Ecology, and a small set of printed whipser cards. The book will begin making its way into the world in August.