Because yesterday I found the skull of a beaver
in the woods where I walk—far from a pond, far
even from a perennial stream—today I am writing
about dams. And I am wondering, as the vacant eyes
of the beaver peer into this early May morning,
into the pine just now being carved by long teeth
of sunrise, about the two floodlights the neighbors
left burning since they retreated to the city two
weeks ago, to their first home and their good jobs
that pay the meager power bill that even now lights
our domestic wilds. And this leads me to wonder
about effluence, particularly when it comes to prayer,
and how pressing two hands together seems an act
of sublimation when supination may be more apropos,
as it was last week when I offered my open hands
to a cup of turbid river water, prayed over by elders
at a ceremony to welcome the salmon back
from their journey to the ocean, even though the salmon
are not returning, impeded as they are by dams,
that keep them from their first homes. And my hands
seem discontent, eager as they are to do some work,
which is why I started writing about dams, and wasted
light and which is why I am wandering about a nascent
pond searching out fist-sized rocks, the kind that knock out
teeth, that black out sockets.