Going down is the poem's first move, and it keeps that downward pull even when it ends by looking up. "We climbed down / to the birthplace of water" opens with a small paradox, since climbing usually means rising, and it sets up a place where ordinary directions don't quite hold. The title fits. Judging by the imagery, this is a limestone landscape where water is both born and swallowed.
On the surface, a group of people ("we") visit a spot where water meets rock. Underneath, the poem is about standing at the edge of something far older and larger than yourself and deciding what to ask of it. Its central idea, I think, is that the landscape is a living body and a sacred place at once. The human response is not mastery but a humble wish to belong, to become part of the same material.
The body imagery builds quietly. "Bloodroot" appears in the second stanza, and "blood-colored flowers" returns later, so that plant life and animal life begin to blur. The water, meanwhile, has a throat: it makes a "gasp & suck" and has "a scum of flotsam in the gullet." That last line has no verb. It is pure, unpleasant sensation, and it refuses to prettify the scene. Birth here is also debris and swallowing. Even "crevasses," a word more at home on glaciers than in a woodland, enlarges the scale. A crack in the rock becomes a chasm to people crouching beside it.
The poem plays with sound as well as describing it. The plants "sang," but the most striking phrase is "limestoned voices," where a noun is forced to behave like an adjective and voices are hardened into mineral. The next line break does something clever: "inaudible over" ends the line, and the reader waits for the noise before "the gasp & suck" arrives and drowns the voices out. Sound is also built into the wording. Hard c and g sounds run through "crouched," "crevasses," "curling," "calcium," "gasp" and "gullet," giving the whole poem a throaty, guttural texture to match its swallowing water.
The form is free verse. There is no rhyme, no punctuation and no capital letters, only the ampersand, which stands in for "and" twice, in "gasp & suck" and "whitewater curling back / & back." The stanzas are short, one to three lines each, with white space between them like ledges on a descent. The rhythm is mostly two or three stresses a line, and the repeated "back & back" makes a loop like a wave folding over. Because nothing is punctuated, "whitewater curling back / & back we prayed" runs straight into the prayer, as though the repetition of the water has slipped into the speakers' own words.
That prayer is the oddest and most interesting moment. They pray "for a rain of calcium," not for mercy or ordinary rain. Calcium is what limestone and bone are made of, so one reading is that the speakers want to be fixed in stone like the "limestoned voices," to last and to join the place instead of passing through it. The vocabulary is deliberately mismatched, with the language of worship attached to the language of geology. The poem suggests that in a place like this, science and reverence are not opposites.
The ending turns upward: "another sky opened / impossibly high & thin." The speakers are low, crouched in the hollow, so the sky looks remote, and "another" hints at a different world beyond the one they have descended into. The poem never says whether this is a view upward, a reflection or something stranger. The last word, "thin," sets fragility against all the heavy stone, and with no full stop the poem opens out instead of closing.
What makes the poem worth reading is how much it carries with so little. In a few short lines it holds origin, mortality and prayer, and it explains none of them. It leaves line breaks, missing punctuation and a single strange request to do the work that description usually does.