Artery

Not artesian (from the province of Artois
in northern France), but arterial: a cleft
chipped by nature into the jutting jaw
of the cliff’s ruddy face—a cut as deft

and subtle as a surgical incision
(the scalpel’s aim true as a bull’s-eye dart),
a vein tapped with such pinpoint precision,
straight to the water table’s pulsing heart.

How our day stood still when we sought to quell
thirst’s flame on drought-hot afternoons, quaffing
from a mother-of-pearl lined quahog shell
teeth-shivering draughts from that silver spring.

We fancied once the trickle from that rust-
red bluff Ponce de León’s Fountain of Youth.
Now, the atrophy of years an ash-like dust,
our fingertips divine the bone-dry truth.