In Whom We Live and Move and Have our Being
 
It’s October
Snow geese fly far above the trees in sleek silence.
Canada geese circle noisily above the stubby cornfield.
White pines drop their needles through the clear air
transforming the forest floor into a golden carpet
between one day and the next.
 
And beneath all that motion lies
mile after mile of aquifer,
acre after acre of unmoving rock
sturdy enough to support this forest
but porous enough that water seeps, squeezes,
filters its way
pore by careful pore.
 
And who can say which is more amazing
the golden needles
the clear air
those soundless snow geese
 
or the idea of rock so immense
it upholds this paradise
and so permeable
each drop can find its own way.
— By Julie Cadwallader Staub
 
This poem first appeared in the Vermont anthology, Birchsong Volume II.
 
Julie Cadwallader Staub’s poems have been featured on “The Writer’s Almanac” radio broadcast and in various journals and anthologies, notably Garrison Keillor’s “Good Poems: American Places,” and “Poetry of Presence: An Anthology of Mindfulness Poems.” She was awarded a Vermont Council on the Arts grant for poetry in 2001, and her poem “Milk” won Hunger Mountain Review’s 2015 Ruth Stone Poetry Prize. She has an upcoming collection, “Wing Over Wing,” to be published in 2019 by Paraclete Press. The first collection of her poems, “Face to Face,” was published by Cascadia Publishing House in 2010.  Originally from Minnesota, she has lived near Burlington since 1992. You can read her poems and order her books at her website: juliecspoetry.com.
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This poem by Julie Cadwallader Staub feels like a lyrical tribute to the earth, to the visible and not so visible reaches that make it the lush place it is, and to the artful winding nature of its waterways through grasslands, prairies, and mountain slopes. It honors those mineral-rich aqua pura coves deep in the earth that become absorbed by roots of trees and plants growing above them, and that provide sources of drinking water for humans and other animals. Meanwhile in the sky, as the poems observes, are the geese, moving gracefully through their migrations; they, too, always watching for water.
I start to wonder if I should be thinking more about how earth’s water cycles, so consistently reliable for millennia, might be affected by the changing climate, but instead I feel pulled toward thoughts of how beautiful the whole life of a drop of water is. I imagine it joining thousands and millions of others, first as a trickle and then a stream, which might find a river or lake, or in other cases move underground to the storehouse the speaker writes of in her poem: mile after mile of aquifer … unmoving rock sturdy enough to support this forest. As much as water, the poem celebrates rock and how the porous nature of certain ones are able to filter water through, cleansing it of impurities, before it courses on. I think of how water’s deep intelligence and intricate relationship to earth and atmosphere guide it unerringly. How we could, if we chose to, be more like a drop of water.
And I think of the breathtaking patterns that waterways form, especially those that wind through wetlands and outlets for larger bodies of water in snaking, almost labyrinth like ways. They are not unlike spirals, one of the many recurring patterns in nature and the cosmos. Spirals appear in ferns, snails, hurricanes, rivers eddies, the cochlea of the inner ear, and many other places. They reflect the unending nature of the universe, and of everything in it, spiraling in and out of itself. The stages that a drop of water goes through, starting on earth, then traveling through the hydrosphere and eventually the atmosphere, bring to mind this movement, this endlessly recurring motion. 
The poem’s structure and content reflect a bit of this movement, too, with clear images and short lines that carry one wash of words into the next. The water drops begin to seem a little like the golden pine needles, falling to the waiting ground, pushing further into the soil to earth’s depths — but not to disappear — to instead be reabsorbed and refashioned for continued use and continued life. It has been said that nothing ever dies, only changes form. I would add that true beauty, like that held by a drop of water, also never dies, but only changes form.
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Susan Jefts is from Ripton, Vermont, and the Adirondacks of New York. She has been published in many journals throughout the country, most recently, “Fired Up,” an environmental zine, and the anthology, “Birchsong.” She has just completed a new book of poetry, and will be leading more workshops this fall focused on writing, as well as on our deepening connections to nature. Learn more about her work at manyriverslifeguidance.com.