Many Fierce Ripples

How cold the wind is, howling from North, bearing in rough spirals dead maple leaves disentombed, and reminding me of the old dream of a clear and impeccable tundra.

And rocks push the yet-frosty soil before them, and the down of old chickens tumbles this way and that towards the road.

And the daffodils and crocuses rise only uncertainly, and one's dream of bluets withers as if winter were not a time but a condition to which one is now - is necessarily - inured.

And the man without shoes splashes happily through puddles in which the sky is briefly - silverishly - recalled.

And the pine trees splay their limbs and wave without semblance of pattern as if working toward balance, as if swimming through an invisible sea and its beautiful surging currents.

And how silly time is, and ideas of self, and yet how important to give attention to them, and resolve them, and carry their resolution forward so that others may learn too.

And birch trees.

And birch trees.

And my old friend anger coming out shyly near the great withered pine, bearing dented shotgun shells and riddled beer cans and a couple of dull bolts, and how fast he talks and how persuasively, and only after does one realize the paucity of his gifts, and the nature of all resistance.

And moss rising so brilliant and green it is as one's first view of Ireland, and a thousand later subsequent views, especially the weeks on breezy hills facing Castletownbere across the bay, and the Welsh woman - nameless now - who lifted me those many days and nights beyond the cult of ancestry, thus allowing me to discover the Land of Ten Thousand Sentences.

And the church of regret, and the church of bliss, and the secret chapel beyond them both, hidden in a clearing, to which at last I know the way.

And hints in quartz, and in deer prints, and in fox scat and in sentences too for those who know how to look.

And possibility, and choice.

And the many filaments of relationship, all adrift in the fast-moving air, which is both Arctic and tropical, fern-like, and prayerful.

And the songs muttered by the man without shoes as he dances over the tops of rocks and climbs trees to see a little further into the light and tells stories about owl feathers found floating in the air and remembers a time when there was only this.

And this.

And sunlight creeping up the copper bark of so many pines, and the last patch of ice - treasured now four days straight - at last gone, and shadows with their blue hearts stretching away, always away.

And what is corruptible and what is not and what is still confused about the difference.

And the nature of starlight in the presence of the sun.

And I stand finally on the pond's edge, another of the many fierce ripples bearing sunlight forward, and long to enter now the cold water and swim through it to the You the many youse represent.