Mosses “shrink and shrivel while carefully laying the groundwork of their own renewal.” –Robin Wall Kimmerer Gathering Moss: A Natural and Cultural History of Mosses 

While changing a diaper or grading student essays, 
a resonant phrase, rich and moss-grown, would unfurl, reach to me. 
But hands busy, mind distracted, and no time to write words down, 
nothing found water. 
Images dispersed like sand. 

A dry season for many years now, only plants adapted to the creeping
desert thrive: yucca, cactus, trees with tiny leaves and long thorns. 
On this shifting boundary, a spring flowing from an outcrop trickled, 
dripped, died, waiting for the aquifer to refill. 
The moss at its edge turned brown and brittle 
like my paper, dusty and blank. 
The desert claimed my rich interior. 

Little more than mist keeping my inside alive, I taught the bard, 
analyzed sonnets, explained conceits, parsed metaphors. 
A poetry lesson at best, diagraming literary anatomies: 
the rhyme, 
the meter, 
the volta, 
the couplet, 
the parts, not the soul. 
A desiccated brain simply could not gather or grow. 
So, I waited. 

Sturdy stuff, moss. 
Dormant, existing for years without rain in a sidewalk crack, 
I found a small brown thought curled, a conservatory of notebooks and journals,
pinging from the past. Following a once memorized map, I landed 
in a swamp of words, nearly drowned face down in living mud 
before remembering to breathe, hydrate, uncurl, and green again. 
Feathery stalks of instinct adhere to words more strongly 
than grains of sand to each other. 
A puddle absorbed by dust can become a spring again.