Old Woman at the Well

If I never took Sunday walks with you
to the old home place, if I never held you over
the well’s wooden edge and guided the cool metal
dipper to your lips, if the shaft of darkness
wasn’t there in dreams for you to fathom,
then you might not feel the rough hole in the bucket
and worry about your unquenchable thirst.

Let me tell you about the sad little boy who was
your father.
He waited in the blazing sun with a dipper of
water for his mother picking tobacco to put food
on the table.
Every day she’d tie that boy to the windlass
of her spirit and lower him into the merciful
darkness.
He’d sing out the damn cat’s in the well again.
He’d touch with blind fingers the pickaxe claw
marks of the old men who dug down to the deep
water.

Our bucket runneth over, saith the preacher.
But the dirt seeped through our pores, because
the land found its level in us.
We wove pine roots over our heads, stacked up
walls of white flint.
There is a story in the Bible about Jesus asking
a woman to draw some water for him.
I don’t think it happened that way, but still
we should learn to have wary faith.
There is a sun to parch us, and underground
a river of living water to carry us to the end of the row.

My memory floods back then sinks heavily to
the bottom of the rope’s reach.
The splashes of light break the black circle, the rope
coils again around the windlass effortlessly.
When you poison a man’s well, be very sure
of what you’re doing, be very sure.