Cascades

I.
What, like mornings,
recurs but will fade?
A wasp’s

white sting
on the bareback deer
coming awake.

II.
Can a silken fish
outstrip in beauty
the lotus?

Both are flaps of flesh,
dead cushions,
mediators

between lightfalls
and those limpid floods,
air and water.

III.
Does the stripling-tied
chrysalis
drink treesap in secret?

No, not like salamanders
swill dampness,
nor vines the sun,

but like a loonsong
pulls vacant cries
from the forest.

IV.
What of the lake
so abyssal?
It lives,

a cascading depth
that trembles
full but desolate.