signs of Love
That our invention mimes.
Mountain Stream
Oh, ecstasy of the enfolding cold stream
Clasping my limbs between the hills,
Issue of the run of snowmelt
Off high peaks, rippling in rills
Down the mountains to make a silver seam!
Hour by hour the broiling sun grills
My back as I toil up rocky trails,
Through fern and fireweed, over windfall,
Under placid pines with green tales
Of light and shade and silence on the old hills.
Where the purling stream awaits me sails
An eagle, circling slowly: sign
In heaven, like Christ’s bright star,
That Living Waters run here, mine
For the taking: that here the Lord unveils
His luminous glory. Waters, shine!
Quicksilver, flash! Make mountains sing!
Oh, listen! Currents rush, hissing;
Stones clunk on the bottom, thumping;
Air clamors; keen wind zithers in pine.
Waked out of heat by the sonorous ring
Of rocks and the quick-running stream,
I ease my limbs down into cold’s
Bracing clasp, cold’s blue dream
Of liquid motion, and, borne, go slipping
Over drowned rocks, by sunken trees,
Through a green watery medium,
Below bright bubbles chattering at the surface.
I fin, buried, and all blight
In me is drowned and swept away downstream.
Oh, I ache, recalling that ecstatic flight
Through mountain waters long ago!
There was all my youth contained
And summed; and there, in that pure flow,
Love washed me clean and folded me in Light.
Life’s truth defies the river’s current; so
I, going after treasures stored
In time’s alluvium, bring up gems
Not lost, as feared, but just ignored,
Being, far from past, the Future’s signs below.
A Moment by the Sea
One by one the gray-winged oblongs with lemon beaks
Lift on updrafts off the bay where wind knocks cliffs,
Then float, feint left, right, tilt wings, glide downwind,
Make their flight over privet, clumped pines, brambles,
While their wood-and-canvas cousins on the water below
Take the same hefting wind and zigzag seaward.
Sails like triangular mosaics stud the cobalt,
Scattered shards and flakes of blue and gold;
On the ocean’s edge, where sky and water fuse in haze,
The colored patches blur and disappear.
The jigsaw bay of marble is a puzzle piece
Inserted in the worn brown perforated coastal rock.
The water’s surface under wind’s lash knots and wrinkles
Like the cracked rock puckering the headlands.
Waves slap shorelines and scour rock pools;
They swallow distant outcrops and seethe on reefs;
Wind shears their wooly fleece.
Near land algae stain the sea floor green,
Gulls’ shadows brush the water’s skin,
Diving cormorants throw up nosegays of spray.
The garrulous wind cruising in the Norfolk pines
Murmurs to the sonorous waters the secrets of Creation.
Waves and trees converse. Sea and earth, bonded,
Hung by the Creator in the void, rejoice.
Reflections
Under the river shines a parallel world.
People on balconies in the water,
A voluble audience,
Stare up at people on balconies above them,
Actors on a stage;
Smiling yellow windows in the river
Wink at their twins smiling down at them;
Diners on the underwater terrace
Toast their fellow guests on the terrace above;
The concave bridge under water nearby
Welcomes its lover hanging in air—
Water admiring stone,
Mind remembering flesh;
Trees growing upside down in the river
Dream they’re standing upright on the grassy bank.
O mellow images, dream on:
Decorate recollection,
Summon merriment,
Echo laughter.
As night falls,
Go
