Dowsing for Joy

The dowser says he can discover joy
as well as water or the whereabouts
of elk in hunting season. Unfurled wire
hangers and forked sticks nestle in a leather
quiver he carries up our gravel drive
until a fold of land calls him to the west.

In the woods he seems half his eighty years
and his pale blue eyes deepen to sapphire
as he gazes where the breeze disappears.
He says there are signs everywhere,
obvious things that most of us simply miss
like the scent of blooming lilies carried on air,
or hidden fields of force that call us home
when we can no longer bear to be alone.
What is music but waves plucked from the sky
and is color not light disturbed before the eye
can find it? He reminds us no one doubts
the fact that wild animals know weather
well enough to hide before a storm arrives.
Are we not animals too? The agitation of a boy
lost in the forest pulls like the moon on tides
if a dowser is tuned in, if he can ask
the right question at the right time and cast
his spirit before him into the dark.

He stops to stake a vein of water for the site
of our well and strings ribbon over limbs
to track its turnings. Something tells him
there is more to know here. Among the oak
and fir he whispers questions to the night
ahead and smiles first at me, then at my wife
as the wires in his fists cross to find us both.

Floyd Skloot
The End of Dreams
Louisiana State University Press

Copyright © 2006 by Floyd Skloot.
All rights reserved.
Reproduced by Poetry Daily with permission.

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