Poems of River, Muse & Math

How to be in this year of 2025 that looks at best–tumultuous? Looking at the first three poems I wrote for Ekphrastic Poetry (poems inspired by art or photographs) this past week, I notice an unintended thread with the flow of the river. Questions and ponderings are flooding the predawn. Where do we rest, sleep, and dream in the wild ride of our lives from origin to confluence? How do we navigate free fall, pools, eddies, whitewater, and backwaters? When the creative spirit feels lost in a whirlpool, know we can spin up like a leaf to ride the wave train with joy. Know, too, that we who love this wondrous earth so deeply are like millions of water droplets and we are powerful.

River Mouth

River flows in feather, sap, leaf, moss, fin, and story
Opens her mouth wide to confluence with the sea
Hurrying to fling herself over a sandstone cliff
into jade waves cresting on the verge of breaking

Whoops and hollers in her roller coaster ride
plummeting freefall, spraying susurrations
of bird song cascading down from mountain
birthplace spun by Gray-crowned Rosy Finches
twittering icy snowflakes shook from clouds

Now in her last waterfall, millions of droplets
uncouple from sinuous flow. Ephemeral as mayflies
emerging from her belly to fly on translucent wings
for one precious blink
They jewel, spark, and glitter

Muse

A curvaceous pear ripens on the tip of my pen
falls into dawn, an abalone shell
swirling in opal, rosy quartz, and mussel blues

Grape clusters fresh from vines, sour lemons
encased in rinds, apples on a roll are spinning
with the earth rotating around the sun

For a moment, I’m outside of it all, suspended,
blocked by a glass window muffling fecundity
until my pen tip drops to the blank page

Geometry of Sleep

If square baffles of my down comforter
were triangles, pyramids, periwinkle prisms
reflecting moonlight

Would I sleep?

If dreams funneled from cylinders, leafy spheres
greened insomnia, and Pi romped free from ratio
of a circle’s circumference to its diameter

Would I sleep?

After all, Pi is an irrational number, a rascal
racing pell-mell over any hope of eyes closing,
Slumber feathering my abstract brain.

Pi morphing into rhombus settles down
with a sigh, tucked under my pillow like
a tooth waiting for the fairy.

Sleep at last whispers her secret solution.
Far from numerical. She is the rumple
for every planed edge.

The unbounded equation.

• With gratitude to poet Laurel Benjamin who leads our Ekphrastic Poetry group and curates the images.