For Barney
Since you built it, you know that there is more rock there
Than water and more air than
Rock—there where fire has no place. The familiar
Old thing, its audacity is mere and thin
As its shaft, stabbing into this Pliocene crop
Of driftless children. Dear nearly dead dynamic thing,
It hardly begins to know itself before it spits and slops
And vomits air. Then, with a cough
And a rush of sucking sounds, it slips up the crude iron pipe
That responds with shivering thunder down between the elven earth
And cousin rock, always
To engender water forth — forth — and forth.
But also, like ghosts behind a clock, crusted gray as
A vole’s pelt and crimson-jawed, the years of rust creep
Upward in more silent ease
Along its sloughing shaft, and fold
Their slender gelid claws around the man-squared handle,
Worn to a green shine with use. Its rucked crank grows grumpy and old
With weather—the same by which the gaskets, cracked as candle
Wax, have lost their Vulcan grip.
So within the icy tangle
Of four winds, a million suns pique, hone and strop
This Sisyphean siphon
Into a steady ceaseless drip,
A metronome of drops to set its count of winters in Wisconsin
As it slides and plunges air
Through its piston
For a deep transmission of elements, where ages of rock are
Greater than time. And more timeless
Than rock¬, there is water here, more — more — and more —
All of it thirsty as
Fire’s industry to slake
The spongy spring-formed surface
Of the cold-cased earth. The pump takes
A breath, drawn from subterranean catastrophes,
And exhales. Submerge your hands within its stream of cold—they will ache
Like the grief of memories —
Baptize your tongue in its running column of blue, it will be struck
Dumb as tomorrow’s yesterdays.
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