Tuesday, October 20, 2020

Vortex by the River

The river calls the trees into it
To materialize
In the mind's moving lines

Stones underneath in gold
Despite the care taken to be separate
They are inextricably part of the whole

And — trompe de l'oeil — one never knows
If the tree is in the water or the sky
— It could be both, so deep is its green

And in the sheen
Black branches rise
Like arms to be lifted skyward

And braver rocks try the island life
In the oncoming flow
Dry in a world of water

They pop up at distances apart,
Different sizes, colors, dispositions —
But there’s no escape from the whole

Framed by the river 
As part of its murmuring prayer
Even as they stay still as pines

Shards of blue come between 
The long black alder limbs
And their twittering boughs

In the slow migration of leaves 
Free to leap, to disappear into the soil
Of a different color, or to follow the river down

The sun's come over the ridge to mark the wrinkled bark,
Each tree a university of individual expression
In the white and mute spotlight

Then a curve of rapids are mountain tops moving,
A response to a theoretical actual alpine source
Also moving away, down an unquestioning course

The force of an idea is such, such is gravity
And such is the inevitable need to reply, as water does,
Raising its hackled mane as it slides through the sluices

Only to smooth again
Into an undisturbed surface of everything else
Until the next turbid fall into foam

The poplar responds, also, 
To the softening of the sun
With a gold brilliance, a kind of wisdom

Their leaves dance at the wind's hand 
Down to the ground,
Making a sound the cicadas complete

As do the rapids that curl and balance
In a sharing of force,
The power is somewhere else

The leap of white comes 
From a familiar 
Yet unknowable source

Though it seems the leap
Is water's own, willful and spontaneous, 
The eccentric harmonized just as it lifts

Water drips across the stones 
To the stream from someplace else, 
But there is no place 

But this for it, as it folds inside the accumulate,
Where every thought that ever was 
Blends into its perfect expression

The trees and the grasses are mere fans 
Waving along the chasm
As the cheers roll along

Then the river gives way as the sun moves on
To white, the mirrors have turned to light
Observing only the motion, the process

Of thought thinking, 
Ideas being conditioned,
To be reformed at a further bend