Others taunt me with having knelt at well-curbs
Always wrong to the light, so never seeing
Deeper down in the well than where the water
Gives me back in a shining surface picture
Me myself in the summer heaven godlike
Looking out of a wreath of fern and cloud puffs.
Once, when trying with chin against a well-curb,
I discerned, as I thought, beyond the picture,
Through the picture, a something white, uncertain,
Something more of the depths--and then I lost it.
Water came to rebuke the too clear water.
One drop fell from a fern, and lo, a ripple
Shook whatever it was lay there at bottom,
Blurred it, blotted it out. What was that whiteness?
Truth? A pebble of quartz? For once, then, something.
deep mist &
the coot dips its head
into marsh water
When Polyhymnia sends refracted light
shimmering toward parched and shriveled roots,
seeking some semblance of promise kept alive
between her hands, her well, her seeds and soil,
A bit of fluff, a female Anna's, comes
to perch nearby, cocking its tiny head
and waiting. Waiting for the hose to steady
its cold blast toward some fainting eggplant
or tomatillo, ready for a burst of aimed
delight, catching one rainbowed drop of water
short, then flitting to the fence again,
shivering. To the Muse of hymns and farmers it's
a game, to the throbbing ball of feathers more.
Its heart will stop without the gift of rain.
You offered water
in a glass, and said:
you must go.
I did; or tried —
the tide returns.
The great blue heron, common on the Island
Is a refugee from dirty water,
Not liking pollutants in the cold soup
She fishes for nourishment and flavour.
Look at the way she stands, as jokers say
With just one foot at a time in the water,
Counting herself a delicate creature
Subject to chills, although I've not seen her
Shift her stance from one leg to another
To disturb perfection in her figure
Surreally drawn, as if with a few strokes.
The chatter and movement of other bird
Sorts are not for her. Still as space she looks
Between her toes for fish, and when she moves
The lightning is more sudden than the stroke
She makes, I guess. Or if dissatisfied
Leaf-detritus is pool-clung
Held in
Rankled-water
Battle-aftermath,
Winter beats a hollowed-drum.
Men dream into flesh
between long nights,
weaving their breath
into memory,
and believing
that memory
mirrors the world,
as if men's names
were not just water
singing softly
to be heard.
You flow, you do not understand,
The spring has eked you out of the earth.
You fell from the storm, you barely coalesce
Before the journey begins.
A gust of wind from a cloud’s dead eye
Blows you onto the clay of the north.
A pond, where the spawn of a million frogs
Grope in the steam of batrachian suns.
At the end, a hesitant stream.
Gentle, the grass barely parts in your path.
By noon, you lay blind in the sun’s deep maw.
You fear you are the plaything of the world,
A god whose cruelty is your solitude.
You flow, you do not understand,
You cannot feel your strength.
The folly of your winding way.
For all the grief I have given with words
May now a few clear flowers blow,
In the dust, and the heat, and the silence of birds,
Where the lonely go.
For the thing unsaid that heart asked of me
Be a dark, cool water calling--calling
To the footsore, benighted, solitary,
When the shadows are falling.
O, be beauty for all my blindness,
A moon in the air where the weary wend,
And dews burdened with loving-kindness
In the dark of the end.
When music sounds, gone is the earth I know,
And all her lovely things even lovelier grow;
Her flowers in vision flame, her forest trees,
Lift burdened branches, stilled with ecstasies.
When music sounds, out of the water rise
Naiads whose beauty dims my waking eyes,
Rapt in strange dream burns each enchanted face,
With solemn echoing stirs their dwelling-place.
When music sounds, all that I was I am
Ere to this haunt of brooding dust I came;
While from Time's woods break into distant song
The swift-winged hours, as I hasten along.
The going of the glade-boat
Is like water flowing;
Like water flowing
Through the green saw-grass,
Under the rainbows;
Under the rainbows
That are like birds,
Turning, bedizened,
While the wind still whistles
As kildeer do,
When they rise
At the red turban
Of the boatman.
The light is like a spider.
It crawls over the water.
It crawls over the edges of the snow.
It crawls under your eyelids
And spreads its webs there--
Its two webs.
The webs of your eyes
Are fastened
To the flesh and bones of you
As to rafters or grass.
There are filaments of your eyes
On the surface of the water
And in the edges of the snow.