The Flow

The Flow

 

When I look at the stream

I see the river;

the architecture of life

presents itself continuously:

gulls nestled beneath the bridge,

Canada geese browsing beside it.

I reach down as it ripples over rocks,

water warm to my touch

as if it flows from a tap.

 

Even a simple path

between the house and the road

has its continuities,

the unruly and ragged undergrowth

are potential trees,

stones are crags,

a garden mound

a mountain I climbed in Japan.

 

Can you truly see

when you are not seen?

When I am so hidden

I am a shadow;

nothing I observe is substantial.

 

Better to let an all-encompassing universe

focus on you,

bathe you with its radiant particles.

Such satisfaction is instantaneous.

 

Everything flows

from there to here.

The Mexican souvenir

coat of armor that leans

crookedly against a tree

in our back yard

is a nest

in which small birds

have made their home.

 

I hear the thwack

of balls

from the community tennis courts

beyond my house,

and they are the slow

staccato rhythm of post-modern music,

music that flowers,

before it bursts like a brazen bomb,

fireworks on the Fourth of July.

 

There is no end to this phenomenon,

a stream of constant transmutation,

these infinities of renewal,

the grandeur of comparison:

Just imagine a parallel universe

whose equally valid equations

would not permit the exaltations

of biological existence,

the almost impossible grandeur

of language,

thought,

the rise and fall and rise again

of everything.

 

The ordinary becomes exotic,

bone-dry rocks

ground to dissolution.

Water, fresh as a newborn,

trickles down between my fingers.

 

 

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