Summoned

            (with a deep bow to Bruce Lee)


That’s when she said it: be like water.
or maybe it was, Oh Annie!
just be like water.
And I wanted to, then.

But water behaves or misbehaves
in all those mysterious ways.

Ocean water alone does a dozen
different things—before breakfast.

The Mississippi is a different creature
from the Nile.

And what about ice,
which is absolute water.

Or water forced by a massive dam
to drown a canyon? That’s one thing.

The run-off after helicopters dump
scooped-up water on a wildfire? Another.

Or maybe she meant a forest pool, quietly
hosting water-striders.

Well, remember how shocked we were,
in science class, to find out
the human body is 60 percent H2O?
I’m already a quick cascade through a weir.

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Annie Stenzel (she/her) was born in Illinois, but did not stay put. Her full-length collection is The First Home Air After Absence. Her poems appear in Atlanta Review, Chestnut Review, Gargoyle, Kestrel, Lily Poetry, Nixes Mate, On the Seawall, SWWIM Every Day, Thimble, and The Lake, among others. A poetry editor for the online journals Right Hand Pointing and West Trestle Review, she lives on unceded Ohlone land within walking distance of the San Francisco Bay.