Sometime After Breakfast

Poetry by Will Walker, Summer 2015

*

Some days what’s best said is nothing. Do the dishes.

Let the water rushing from the kitchen tap

and spattering in your fifty-year-old white porcelain sink

be your soundtrack, tuneless music, an aqueous rat-a-tat

little snare drum of busy bubbling strict time running

on and on, telling you all about its full life, born

aboard a turbulent cumulus, accrued in the Sierra Nevada

in a hard, white winter attended by the tough mugs

of massive boulders and the ministrations of a forest

of firs, whole monkish colonies bearing witness

to snowmelt and trickle, a white field dissolving

into sedge and grass and wild orchids, a sea

of Indian paintbrush, phalanxes of forget-me-nots.

Then the deep absorbent meditation of earth,

and the engineered fugue of dam and pipes and valves,

followed by the burst of daylight and this happy exit down

a copper pipe, headed on a journey to begin again.

*

Will Walker lives in San Francisco with his wife, Valerie, and their dog. He is a former editor of the Haight Ashbury Journal. You can read more at http://www.erickentwines.com/pages/category.jsp?catid=212