Handmaid

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“I have not spoken in secret, 
            in a dark place of the earth.” —Isaiah 45:19 

She turns at the well, the pot on her hip,
            resting before filling it, 
lifting it, returning home. The Pool of Siloam.
            Hezekiah’s Water Tunnel, 

the western fountain on the Road to Emmaus.
            The Pool of Bethseda. 
She could swim Jerusalem from well to
            dreaming issue beyond 

the western wall. “The word of God is like
            water in the desert,” 
she whispers, lowering the pot to the damp,
            “although darker 

than we imagine; deep, rare, like happening upon
            the blossoming 
of dates in a savannah where the only grass
            is sand, the trees 

            this one tree beside a well. The word of God
                        is an accident 
            we discover or do not, except for these
                        wells in this place 

            where one knows the way from Siloam to
                        Hezekiah’s channel, 
            from water through the desert and to home.”
                        She is walking, 

the water on her hip as though she were
            balancing a child. She is singing, low:
“I am the handmaid of my Lord. I am a vessel
            for the water that is the world.”