The scalloped silver bowl sits front
and center in the sanctuary, half-full
or empty every Sunday morning.
Water to baptize or remember baptism.
One morning a woman asked as I filled it:
“You get your holy water from the tap?”

I hate I disillusioned her, but really, what
did she expect? That each week I hiked
some high hill, stone jar balanced
on my shoulder, called down
water from the sky?

Still, in many places, water is drawn
with rope and bucket,
collected from streams,
filtered with charcoal and fire,
passed through chapped and split lips.

In many rural somewheres as we speak,
fields crack open like dry knuckles
in winter, while giant generators
guzzle water meant for living,
harvesting not crops
but human thought. Sacrilege
of the highest order.

O human, don’t you know? Holy
is the water from tap and toilet,
Elkhorn and Jordan, in tear ducts
and pores and my dog’s metal bowl,
in tides and torrents and trickling in buckets,
gushing fountain of every living thing.