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
