Perhaps When It Had Water in It

They were not good storytellers.
They had no personality.
Their details never added up

To so much as plain commonsense,
Much less a plot or a punchline.
Their sentences slid like sand dunes.

Voices and characters were ghosts
And placeholders. They sounded real
Enough, a phrase at a time, but

Like the sentences, they never
Turned full round. And yet, they used past
Tense, and people’s names, and events

In a mostly prosaic way,
So that you always felt they might
Get somewhere, but the thing with streams

Gently moving through the bright day
Is that you can say, they’re going
To the ocean, it’s all downhill,

The water always knows the way,
But you never catch them, do you,
Entering, joining the ocean?

No, their little wet sentences
Murmuring along aren’t going
Anywhere, not in any tense.