NINE RIPPLES ON THE LAKE
Will it take your names, all your histories,
your reasons for and against?
Will it hear them while it gazes,
timeless, at the timeless changing skies?
Unless you remain in the depths of it,
unless you lose the skin and bones you love,
unless you become welded, wedded to the flow
of remaining still, staying silent,
you cannot know anything of it
but what it is not.
What its eye beholds: an endless upward gaze
of shaping ancestral cloud.
It is an open mouth modelling syllables of ripples,
the sweet rain and beating grey hail.
This steady rest is your antithesis,
O comrades who dig and delve,
who shape and mark out and name
and lose, slash and burn and wonder why
loss is loss and always so painful.
Painful enough for songs that will not be forgotten,
the badge of emptiness and of dogged continuance.
Though you are beautiful in your ways,
you are not as beautiful as this.
Though you belong and hold on, tenacious, to that belonging,
you cannot belong as much as this mirror-edged bright shimmering.
Sit here and do not move. One century, two centuries,
a thousand years, the centuries before forests, before the lands drowned,
before ice, even, as the blackbird pecked the anvil to a nut,
as a stag became tree, and the oak watched as the salmon flicked
its rainbow waters.
The rivers locked and singing here in silver chains, in golden chains.
The lament you hear is your bloodrush, your heartbeat.
The sorrow you feel is your food and your sustenance in darkness.
Hatched and growing, you will swim and wriggle across the oceans,
the rivers beneath the sea ( its orchards, its plough boys,
Its bright jingling chariots, its proud, proud horses in the morning.)
Knowing nothing and knowing everything.
This is how water is, how the lake is.
A metaphor for everything else.
Shimmering mirror memory.
Look down into the highest heaven.
The moment it is reached for, it disappears
—
