I found the Earth poets clustered together on the wooden porch of the store. They were laughing at something one of them had said. The joke still hung in the air like drifting dust from a passing wind. I cleared my throat. They stopped talking and turned to look at me. 
  "Can we help you?" one of them said. 
I suddenly felt shy, gawky and coltish, and my foot scuffed at the dust beneath my feet. 
  "Well. . .what is it?" he insisted.
I took a deep breath and told them I wanted to be a poet, too. Like them. The two who were leaning their chair backs against the dusty wooden front of the store laughed. The skinny one, the one with his feet propped up on the porch railing, looked as if he had tasted something bitter. His narrow mouth curved down, he hawked and spat. A small shock of dust puffed as it landed in the dirt. The oldest one, the one nearest the steps, gave me a peculiar look and I saw a shadow pass behind his eyes - gun-metal cloud dampening the face of the moon. 
  He glanced at his friends and a secret look passed between them; an emotion I could not identify skittered across their faces. The bitter one shook his head like "it's your funeral." The laughing ones shrugged. The old poet turned back to me and raised his arm, pointed. I could see the veins twisting along the back of his hand, skin brown from the sun, fingers wrinkled and worn. There was a nicotine stain between the first two joints of the finger.
  "You see that hill up there?" he asked. 
  I took my eyes from his hand and looked. A hardwood forest, autumn leaves a fractured rainbow, swelled out from the meadow and surged up the hill, covering the sharp ridge above. I nodded.
  "Well, go on up there and get some water and bring it back. I'm a bit thirsty." 
I looked at the hill, then at him. Looked around for a bucket.
  "No," he said and something in his tone caught my attention. "To be a poet you have to go into wilderness and bring back water for the thirsty in buckets made of words." There was an odd cadence to his voice. He looked at me keenly and, of a sudden, his blue eyes were translucent, the bunching eyebrows an archway over some kind of door. Just as I felt myself falling he blinked and the door closed. His glance held me a moment longer, then he turned back to his friends. I watched him lift his nose and turn his head a bit to the side, like a hound to the hunt, as if he were searching out the scent   of that laughter that had hung in the air. 
I paused, hesitant, then turned and began walking toward the hill. I stopped once and looked back but they paid me no mind. My shoes scuffed through fallen leaves, red, gold, and brown furrows trailing me. A slight wind sprang up, a hint of winter's touch in its fingers. Just as I started into the forest I heard one of the others say, "Mind you now, don't go and spill any." A couple of them laughed and then trees older than poets and maybe even language closed around me. I stopped and took a deep breath. Then I began to listen for the sound of water.