George David Clark's "A Crossing" & Blooming Hermit House

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Oh, my hermit heart yearns for this
(don't tell me it's not real: let me believe, believe, believe):
viaviavia

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A Crossing
by George David Clark

Giant salamanders, blue-black and purple-black, lie
along the bottom of this stream in Northern China —

I cannot even balance the place’s name on my tongue.
They lie like bruises in the stone-strewn pools, two meters long

and older now than I will ever be. My naked
feet are the moon color of such fish as each night wake

them to hunger. My cold lungs ache. With bankside willows
going gold and half moon hunched where the cloud-flank narrows,

this stream becomes a kind of syrinx that can speak two
languages at once: beneath the perfect fluency

of water you hear salamanders in their submarine
discourse through the rocks and know that tooth-glint, that ghost-rheum

in their eyes. So how does a man cross here and not upset
the surface, cross so that only his shadow gets wet?

Linebreak is the best.

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