Brook anew

Slowly the brook meanders
− I retraced my steps back −
past the woodland’s edges;
shadows of rings on the surface
of these flowing waters
move across the stream’s sunlit floor,
bright, glasslike, disappearing,
to reappear
elsewhere.

Here fish live, at times silver flashing,
then like a dark line
            over clear sand, hardly
comprehensible to the eye.
They know not of the shadows,
like letters thrown on the grass
by the trees lining the path −
an othertongue expressing so much,
if only I choose to listen;

just as the way you spoke, so long ago,
and by speaking, caught me;
to hear
the content of those words,
over and over I must convert
 (for ever still keeping the books
for our daily bread,
poet to breathe).

My head is threading those shadows
to a chain for hours on end
and, when I finally read
what the trees have written,
my heart smiles
(while the fish flash past
underneath the rings
and I come up for air).

The world returns now,
but only older than before
by a minute …