A ROOM TO THE WORLD In this mountain sanctuary I rent by the day, and dream in by night my senses are rooted in a clockwork earth, one thought for each breath, one sight for each tick. As the earth moves so does this room. GONE DOWN (For William Stafford) Standing on this bridge, we speak of the river's lesson, how we must drown to learn it or float apart with its current past the splintered piers and gray-washed stone embankments of our city till swept to brackish ocean edge where, transformed with the sudden the wisdom of God, we drift with constant memory of when we did not know together. We cannot swim upstream to the river's source, miles from this bridge, to where the blow from the ax of Hephaestus cracked a granite crag and water trickled down a crevice, puddled on a ledge, ruptured rock, thundered down the precipice. Call it nature, call it love: that is how the unlearned lesson came to be. (c) 2002 Philip Vassallo
	Philip Vassallo A New Jerseyan by way of The Bronx and of Maltese ancestry. Phil works as a corporate communication consultant, and is widely published as a poet, freelance journalist, essayist, and playwright.