Waterglass

She lay to one side:... but why even want to be everywhere at once, she used to say.
Not that she tried. I think of all the things

she would get herself into day by day,
the bath and the bed, and the garden
where she pruned and seeded, carried water

and dumped water, and how she moved, always
silent, sure as the overspill of a spring
river that when pressed, canters into lost

pools and runnels under rock, fills and then
empties back. It was a way she kept
herself clear for whatever might happen next.

--from Annunciation



Waterglass is wishful thinking. The word won't be found in the dictionary, nor will you come across the thing itself in any shop of curios. But there it rests, nonetheless, as an imagined possibility, among and between the lines of Jeffery Donaldson's second collection of verse.