Arethusa: The First Morning
Around the curve where all of me that fountained Leans over, stretches out and is a stream, And loiters back the long, the round-about, The sweet, the earth-way back to sea again— At just that curve I woke. What is awakeness? Is it a thing? Does knowing mean I own it? Before this flash, I sleepwalked through my cycle: Sea, fountain, stream, then waterfall to sea, While never feeling how it feels to feel. I have no memories of what came before. Was I ever, ever anything but water? I have no memory except of quickness, A silver-sandy-gliding-cold delight. What brings this "life" that no one gets by taking? Who lives it? I ripple stronger yet less free: A wet awareness; a pulse of glass; a panting; A tear of longing on a cheek of loam. Life is one kind of death. Before my waking, I felt no dying. Alive, I die at every throb.
Is being alive just something to get used to, Or always startling, like hoofprints on my mirror? I fiercely sensed four petals; sensed a doe. Crossing me. Knee-deep within my foam. I need no eyes. What stream could mistranslate Such script of harmlessness, all trembling, trembling? Harmlessness has a touchable soul, a heart-beat, A tang of faltering and fear and fur. I splashed those moss-mild willowy shanks and knew her; Softer than snails and all my little stones; Warmer than fish or lilies; good to know. Soft warmth in my cool softness. Crossed and gone now. Two sisters, cycles tangent never again. We want to wait . . . because we want to wait. Or going, can't we go a while together? But soilward, seaward, each gropes graveward separately.
A kind of bouncing between clouds and clay: I'll wake out of awakeness into sleep, I'll sleep back through and out of sleep again,— All's back and forth. Slave-bound by back and forth. But once, right here, I'll twist beyond that cycle. One instant shimmering free of it, I am The graceful spray beneath the lace of sunlight, The glint of sparks upon the hinted spray,— Rainbowing out in careless cataract In the first morning's serpentine first fling, Laughing and splashing in the crazy air. Faster. I skid between the rocks like wind Between the leaves. I skim the rocks so lightly I now seem less a river than a breath. O! I have become a newness: a river of air. Or is this rapture nothing but a signal (How can I know yet, being so young awake?) That I have reached my final waterfall? I want to stop because I want to stop. Too late, too late. One blue waits here below, The other above. A million million toes Of dew creep up and stub against the stars, Up, up like centipedes on ladders of light. Sun helps them up, sea yields them up, the clouds Give back. Is this the end, or the beginning? Green-dreamy drifts and lulls below, goodbye; Intimate river-bed, joy of the realness of touching, Clinging to me you never will climb with me now. Now one last jump— I clear the rocks— I fall To rise. I think I'll find no hoofprints on the sky.