The water dipper

Dented, squat, aluminum cylinder, with a flat handle
the length of a child’s forearm. It hangs on a nail
beside a five-gallon crock of well water that sits on a shelf
just inside a fly-stippled screen door. A sweaty pack of kids,
on break from hide-and-seek, are lined up in the fading heat
of a July evening, and the water, cool and clear, is ambrosia.

A stook of decades later, I feel it still, this love, for my cousins,
for that farm, not far from the Whitesand River dam, ripe
with pickerel; for the horse-drawn cutter and rake, resting
in calf-high quackgrass, across from the car bodies, rusting
among clusters of poplars, down from the shop that held
the forge and the bellows and horseshoes; and in the yard,
the smell of cattle and pasture, cut hay, and cow manure;
chickens scattering over purslane and pineapple weed,
nasal blurts of geese, staking out domains beside a dry slough,
choirs of crickets coming on in the rose-grey gloaming,
and the drained dipper in my hand, the slight tin aftertaste,
the water, spilling down my throat, a deep fresh coolness,
rinsing, radiating through my ribs to the ends of my limbs,
my whole skinny body, like a small piston of joy.