skipping stones

i want to

take you like a pebble round smooth stone

from the shorelines of duluth

and skip you across lake

superior

watching you sink

my blessing

to some bottom

of a disappearing point

-- to stand where the jagged point of land

juts out into the water

(one single solitary tree)

say your name

and fling you

sky

high

water

deep

screaming silently

of burned out fire pits

and wood turned

blackened coal

like tar soaked

egrets wings --

(i took your photograph in fields

beside some bursting orange

of your flamed out

hair

making green look more

green

and the white border of the photograph

more

white)



i want you

jangling in my pockets

loose change

that i place on railroad track

an image only i recall

"i hear the train a-coming"



i want to

drain you bottomless

to the rounded curve of my finnish iitalla blue wine goblet

liver soaked

brain



i am not

love hurried

not love weighted

i dont believe in first sight

unless its in a movie

(and i dont believe in hollywood

but i wish their stories

were sometimes true)



i want

full release of

stone flinging

in the vio-lent lines of poetry

that occur between each word

like i did back then

off the edge of

where midwest

water

meets the

sentence

uttering what i needed to mutter

to god invisible

naming stone with yours

and freeing you

to be polished by

freshwater

lake like sea



i want to write your name

in whiteboard marker

on my hand

watch it washed off

running

in this late june

rain

call you

"stone lake skipper"

flinging my hands

sky high

rain puddle deep

in city without

egrets

only

tar paved streets.



i want for

past earth

to break off

clumping

jagged granite

smoothed by great lakes

and a only half decade of history

i stand here

solitary stoic solid tree

jutting looks across watery abyss

releasing rounded flats of rock

that my roots reveal

into

that disappearing point

of

skipped stone

meets

oceanic lake...



-- all blue roads still lead to

water swallowed by

the light of

letting go

pure hearts

release

somewhere up off the edges of

duluth

somewhere on the quiet paragraphs of

some lake

that we call

"superior"


kim thompson. this was written 26 june 2011 sunday. seoul. s. korea