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 house and 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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