Jonah
by Jeff Burt
It’s a body of water without name, a short run,
not a wide creek or small river though about the size,
not a pond or a lake because the water
migrates from one elevation slowly downhill then disappears,
not caught up in a granite bowl or a limestone quarry
or swallowed by or merged in a larger flow.
Mappers for the state decided it too small to name,
the few letters on the page too long for water’s length.
It starts from an artesian spring on Buller’s farm
and shallows and swells as it gets to Anacker’s
where one cannot leap across and in late spring
cows must wade to find their trail.
It does not empty itself into a lake like a worshipper
into a god, just runs out without settling,
or perhaps best described as runs in,
hides in the ground and never comes out,
like my childhood neighbor
thought to be mentally arrested,
a condition we now might call autistic,
who played an elusive version of kick-the-can
with my brother and me under the streetlights
near Memorial Park, sweat pasted to his shirt,
wordless, grinning. That night he disappeared
into his house and the next day
was nowhere to be found,
his father, mother, sister saying
he had to be taken away,
unable or unwilling to say who or what
had done the taking, as if some force
had swallowed him, Jonah in the whale,
but had never belched him back to life.
Some have tried to make a name for that water,
but for generations no name has taken hold,
like a baby miscarried that everyone remembers
and no one talks about, carrying a grief
that grounds him or her or them into the nameless.
All of us have parts of our lives that start
and disappear, parts we wanted to go onward,
parts we want to merge into a greater awareness,
a larger body, be a stem that fed into something greater,
a victory, a community, an art, a place in history,
to escape from one place, to disappear,
then find our mission in a larger world.
And so this water, nameless, I name agua de la gente,
aqua populo, dŵr y bobl, water of the people,
Jonah, I name it Jonah,
that we who are swallowed like this water,
anonymous, may emerge with a name.
Jeff Burt lives in Santa Cruz County, California, with his wife and works in mental health. He has contributed to Williwaw Journal, Red Wolf Journal, Willows Wept Review, and Poetry and Places.
