Slate Pond

Slate Pond

Joy Moore

A night rain and the pond’s rise,
and water spills across the trail’s low stone crossing.
I leap to ford
and find underfoot and descending
beside me familiar slate cliffs
whose trickle today cascades.

Rollicking thickness, the rush gushes
singular,
a wide paraglide off
a huge flat-topped rock.

But I’m fixed where water becomes
hundred—
One voice
makes white trills of shear
and shorn borders, the layers thousand-packed.

Just yesterday, I white-knuckled the wheel,
airing skyward a want
for unwavering solidity,
rid of hesitance,
confusion, exhausting humanness.

Now, in fine copper slabs
born of ash, clay, and shale, whose edges break
as compressed planes accept my weight—
the earth answers
with jagged, scalloped rims, gaps
between ledges, every shadowy depth
filigreed as it sources
water’s glory more.

So I bend
to its fresh spring falls,
fingers spread,
the shallow pool of palms flooded.
Of my curves and variations,
a luminous fountain
promising in time
to smooth the rude
and carve the true peculiar,
its singing distinct and unrepeatable.

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Joy Moore
Poet & Teacher

Joy Moore lives in Tennessee, where, for the last fifteen years, she has taught undergraduate writing and interdisciplinary courses, designed and managed two coffee shops, and led a music and arts venue. Her poems have appeared in the Best Spiritual Literature anthology, Verse Daily, and such journals as 32 Poems, Ecotone, Hunger Mountain, The Greensboro Review, and Prairie Schooner, where she won a Glenna Luschei Award.

Photography by Shana Van Roosbroek