Long ago, I dreamt my mother
gathered sea shells as she wandered
the ocean’s edge, bony toes
sinking into dark sand, dear feet
blessed and blessed again
by the scouring of salt.

And in my dream she bent
like a dancer, hands darting
to capture the spiral a snail left, 
the smile of a clamshell
abandoned to the glimmer of dusk.

She has been dead a month,
and I do not dream.

But in that long ago, 
she gathered shells in a pail, 
returned at dark to some lit room
and laid them out to shine.

I reach for those shells now,
and one-by-one I hold them
to my ear, greedy
for the timbre of her voice
among those ceaseless waves.

My friend's family kept a rain barrel
up against their old brown house,
beneath the shaggy pines whose needles
floated back and forth, tiny splinters 
of sun from all our summer afternoons.
They drank from that barrel then,
forty years ago, and I drank too,
cupping a woodland pool in my small palms,
offering my face, eyes closed,
to its mossy darkness.

Holy water fallen from the sky,
it rose from rivers far away
to drip down evergreens and bless us;
the clouds, my distant companions, 
had come to me in kindness. 

Mushrooms grew between damp stones,
lichen climbed the barrel's wood,
and violets blossomed at its base
where we sat silently at tea,
lifting our little acorn cups 
to taste old rain.