"The Dowsing Rod" (the poem formerly known as "Lake House")

Just wanted to put this up for the sake of posterity.


The Dowsing Rod


Your face against my belly reminds me of childhood
and you say, That’s not something I want to equate with sex.

I laugh, thinking, Who else do your fingers touch,
does your tongue get caught in, if not the schoolyard girl

who doesn’t know to cry when pushed down at recess?
You are pressing against the daughter (mother’s spine,

mother’s throat); thumb tracing the brow of a widow
in late age; heat passed into a woman with child

pulsing against the breast. Part of me is already dust,
only the rough shape of memories bumping together

—which is what you pull between your teeth now.
This is the running motion that keeps a hand from holding on

to the arm of a brook, makes it difficult to mourn the site of drowning.
Though you are probably not the bank or the silt or the reeds,

I suddenly think I am the river; and in this dream I want
to know how water looks at itself without drying.

It might happen by becoming an ocean or lake,
the self roaming in self, lost amongst the weeds…

Yet even still water paces on secret legs in an empty house.
You have your travel and I have mine.

Suddenly the blanket shifts, and I wonder how long
we have been asleep. I did not feel your hands, now

fallen out of my hair. If only we lost this cleanly.
But your traces wander below my skin like a net cast out—

you forgot to haul it back in, left the long night filled
with the murmur of water rippling between strings.