As man-made structure for storing rainwater, the cistern mediates between nature, with its unpredictable elemental processes, and human culture and civilization. It is a place of hope and joy, or fear and desperation, depending on the season. The title poem brings this fraught dialectic vividly to life, and in varied ways, these poems seek out such places of convergence, potentiality and transformation. Intensely symbolic and at the same time deeply invested in the possibilities of poetic form, they posit the lyric as an ongoing contractual agreement between the words and the reader. "I write for no one," the despairing poet writes in "For My Imaginary Pet Chihuahua Who Died of a Heart Attack" (whose extravagant feelings belie any such despair) and invites the reader to turn the phrase on its head, for it to mean: "I write for no one person alone, but for many inclusively and alike." With hopeful daring, these poems speak to the shared natural and human world that underwrites all our works.In the cistern the seasons grewimpatient, a fissure must'veopened, for the waterbegan a long, eventful retreat--planks andvines poked out, breakingthe surface sky...