The long drink.

THE LONG DRINK

Water is never the chosen drink--
until you reach that dry end-point in thirst

where only the most basic element
will quench it. Cold water is the body's drink:

everything else is the vanity of taste buds: those wines
and coffees and soft sour-whiskies--nothing more

than water dressed up in alien clothes,
drinks of comfort for the psyche that lives

on artifice and cleverness, and demands difference.
The body is not dressed up. It's naked, self-confessing,

no matter how we try to cover it. It wants ... water,
being mostly water itself, and when that want is stirred,

it rises up, upends the psyche, and pours into its mouth,
in gulps longer and deeper than any other animal's,

matter's one elixir, stirred only with minerals, earth-tastes.
And you dare not interfere. You dare only watch

from the ground, as the body takes in its awesome drink--
then, satisfied, creeps back

into the hurrying streams beneath the skin
where psyche never goes.