SKY RIVER
Three days now the sky
Has been a rushing river of airs.
Caught in its roar
The bright moon day by day dissolves.
Now a thin cold lip,
An edge of ice fast melting.
Here’s a line, here’s an image,
Bold and clear, easy to recall,
Easy to frame.
But gone and shattered,
A leaping fish, up and shining;
A crystal hung in the sun
Never the same patterns of spinning colour;
A stream, a burble of tumbling,
One melody caught but then lost,
A fugue of endless forgettings.
So, the points, the main points,
Quickly before they slide, again, away.
What and where is the wind when it is not blowing?
What and how is a river when it is not flowing?
What and why is the mind when it is not full of words?
How can we say anything is certain
When we fail even to remember
Our passionate dreams from the fading dark of dawn?
Nothing seems fixed in the buffeting swirl of mind’s river.
I am the possessor of the sight
Of a juggler with knives and doves
Enraptured, disbelieving, horrified.
But I is an eye
In a peacock’s tail,
A ripple and splash
Over a river’s wide shore.
My certainty, no more than that cloud,
Breathing and gone as it races southwards,
Seawards, forgotten on the horizon, no longer itself,
Melted, merged, a long sigh.
Hold here, hold here, anchored.
That is, perhaps,
To miss the point.
Consider this elegant and judicious thought!
Consider this cloud, this sparkle of light,
This aeolian harp. This sound
That comes and that goes
( in the forest is there even a roaring
With no ear to hear it?).
There is something,
But it seems nothing when held.
There seems something,
But it is only a dreaming of numbers and probabilities.
The wise having spoken,
The rabble clamour and grab those chiselled phrases
(lacking any memories of their own).
The wisdom of mankind:
A moon melting away into shade,
A wind rocking the rafters,
Shaking the valleyed woods,
Inchoate, a chord.
Hold, and it is lost, dismembered, forgotten.
The colours of the dawn: a sequence of shifts, no moments,
No savoured fragments. Only as the blink
Of an eye, an inability to keep
Attention,
A distraction of impressions.
Mind, a movement of itself
Outward into itself,
A brash Mozart
Of improvised narcissism.
If you are not now looking at me
Then what am I?
Give me worth
Or I am less
Than dust
On the tongue.
Dissect and sever
Dream from sleep,
Sleep from waking,
Sense from feeling,
Real from fantasy.
Dam the air, dam the stream,
Divide the slow curves,
Tree shaded,
From the racing weir,
Rock shouting and white.
This moment of perfect sky,
Three woodpigeons buoyed and floating
Down to the small green field.
A rip of blue.
Two gulls distantly weaving.
Cloud shifting from grey to pink,
Teased out,
Carded fine and white
Through the teeth of the fast cold.
Recording moments:
A needle stuck
Repeating the same few bars, the
Same few, the same.
Or a rabble of squabbling voices,
A heckling audience,
Swaying faces in the dark.
A consensus of insanity
Taken to be, of course, sanity.
The sky is pearl and golden.
Three day’s wind
Has smoothed out the light,
Has rubbed the hills green and smooth,
Has dissolved the moon.
That is all.
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simonhlilly 