Erin Coughlin Hollowell
One Grain

Under the haphazard arches of alder
the creek makes its own broken music.

Low light catches, like dream fish
that rise to meet raindrops,

and I am shadows unskeined.
If only I could fade further

at this boundary between bankruptcy
and blooming. Empty the glass

of myself into the water that now
burbles over stones and steeps brown

in pools before stuttering towards
the tide. I might carry one grain

of sand a million years, a message
over a hundred miles, to the sea.

Would that then disperse this apparatus
I call god, so divided from the music
that began this wondering?

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