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Alms for the Soft Ringing of the Stream

By Lawrence Wray

A wooden footbridge reaches over the stream where the available sunlight is diffuse on the Touch-me-nots. I made for this place at the first hint of being at home. Here below the water treatment plant I hear acorns drop on the road above. Nothing substantial separates me from the misused men I see sleeping on the grass in the park across from the Light of Life shelter. Jack-by-the-hedge becomes pungent, the clustered white flowers ardent— almost the only other company I can bear this afternoon—Sassafras on the path border, the run dropping over flagstones so wide they make a stairway, spilling from pools and ducking under the footbridge. It’s nothing from my seat I can look down on and see my shadow dangling feet over the water, my face looking up between my legs at a blind spot. Listening to passing notes as the run pours away, I see the matted hair and soiled clothes, the plastic bags. But here it feels I’m not kept apart. The eighteen inch Madonna that stood tucked in on a rock shelf is missing. But the still standing dead tree across the bridge, and the living and dead I carry—both the suffuse and those becoming suffuse—they’re at hand. No need to stack stones where she stood. If I saw a few that were balanced, I might linger here more, the closest thing I’ve seen in the city to a holy well. But runs like this dwindle or dry up

or gush in rain, an overlooked waste place, redolent with its own kind of silences. The tree stripped slowly of bark strips me. Radiant Black-eyed Susans strip me.

Lawrence Wray’s work can be found in the anthology Verse Envisioned and in journals such as Crab Orchard Review, Presence, Poetry Salzburg Review, Indiana Review, Innisfree Poetry Journal, The Dark Horse, and Pittsburgh Poetry Review. His collection, The Night People Imagine, has twice been a finalist for the Antivenom Prize at Elixir Press. New work can be found in Coal Hill Review and Relief.

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