Some people in your life will be rivers.
Deliberate,
refreshing.
If you stay you will be contented.
If you make your home on the banks
you will lose your voice,
carried eventually to the sea.
Even some who attempt to cross
are swept away.

Others will be like cairns.
You will depend on them
but they are
the type of guide
you leave behind.


Some people are like ledges,
cliff and crevasses
too steep to reach
too deep to know
made unreal by fear.
There are those who live below a stark face,
some climb over,
some never see the next valley.
Some wishing they had let a river take them.

There will be plant people
and animal people.
You will love them
and eat them.
Your warmth
will be their pain.
You will cry in the night
beneath their skin.

There will be maps.
There will be a talisman.
There will be rot that finds you when you are away.
See these people.
Feel them in your pockets and around your neck.
Map kept close,
pragmatic tutor.
Close, though not so close as the talisman,
all comfort and beauty.
Not so close as rot,
with you always.

People!
People!
and
I,
knowing people,
am known in turn.
We fold and flow
harden, drop
burrow, drift,
and soften,
becoming the cloth  
woven in waking.
A map, a river.


As clay,
at once
shaped,
the hollow in
everyone's hand.