An American dipper’s diving from a rotten log.
Every atom of every moment contains the same
Plus change, change and also, as well, the same.
We can think of no other functional compromise
This evening, knowing this stream as we do
From many sporadic visits over many years,
The week we kept close, almost ear to the water,
Working out tautological equations, the night
We arrived nearly midnight and tottered by moonlight
To the island to bathe bleary mind in the incessant
Rush of intimately similar loss and replacement.
The early discovery with a late wife. The later visits
With the next. With daughter alone, who delighted
In the frogs as much we delighted in the water.
It can only be that the cosmos, the ongoing, remains
Indivisibly riven in its most infinitesimal phenomena,
Change and same together, always together,
Always dancing at the core. No exchange is ever
Completed, no sameness ever stays, and yet,
This is the same stream as it was all its yesterdays
And changed in every subatomic aspect since
We blinked. Matter is transformation and ghosts
Are what remain, or ghosts are matter liberated
And the transformation alone carries the same
In its endlessly crushing embrace downstream.
And now we’ve lost track of the dipper obsessed
With diving as hungrily as we’ve thought these things.
No comments:
Post a Comment