Traveling Water

A few weeks ago
while visiting a daughter in Montana,
I stood at the headwaters of the Missouri River
tucked away in a wide mountain valley.

We had hiked for an hour or so
through scrubland with the smell of sage in the air
to view the gathering of rivers
where Lewis & Clarke had camped
some two hundred years earlier.

A few weeks later
I find myself downstream in Memphis,
wondering if the brown waters
that I view from my hotel window
are the same that I saw
flowing clear over river rocks out west.

I think about being taken up into the sky,
coming back down as rain on the plains,
again being caught up in the great river basin.

Or maybe I flow and wind my way
along thousand mile stretches of river banks,
sightseeing, careless with no mind of my own,
moving with all that is around me
under the great big sky.

Many Waters

I said, "I awoke this morning believing
waves are caused by dolphins."

She said, "If those waves don't drown us,
we can all play together at the water 
fountain park."

I asked, "Which do you like more: slides,
pools or jets of water intermittently
hurling out of nowhere?"

She answered, "I like it most when my
expectations are disastrously too low."

I remembered, "King David once wrote 
of how God draws us out of many waters."

She thought aloud, "I wonder what
the many waters may be."