28.1.2012 • Walk to the Lake

Walk to the Lake

Today I took my old brown coat
and walked all the way to the lake,
faking prose into poetry all the while.

It was a good day, charming
weather though greystained and soaking wet:
it felt as though the rain was making its way through a familiar crowd,
big droplets among miniscule ones, all water
and no air to breathe, not really.
(I breathed in the water in lusty lungfuls.)
As the ground softened and sank into the crevices of my boots’ soles
I made my way over Little Hill (the name kids have
for the mound-before-the-lake, or at least which they had when
I was one of them) and into the pearly lakeshore.
All the pebbles there are round, completely spherical, as if
by some enchantment, and shine like huge ocean ornaments each of which could buy
the whole wide world (oh well).

I wrote no foot-notes nor end-notes to-day, but when I reached the lake
I felt I knew why, the droplets falling through the drops dropping
into the calm waters and disturbing the peace with quiet:
no footnote, no endnote especially
can ever explain why a drop makes its way
through the water and into the lake,
through the lake’s infinitely complex
minutely distorted mirror
and into its vast belly of a world,
or chooses to stay in the dryness of the moisty clouds
in such unsure security as those platonic heights can offer.
(The foot is basely rooted to the ground;
the end of ends can speak and of beginnings murmur,
but of these endless risings of the tide, and fallings,
it can never make excuse, nor explanation give.)

I thought of crying there, and then my fancy flew
to a tear’s shape in stasis–tear-shaped is meaningful only if tears are
seen as constant-flowing, always moving along the softness of the face or
through the harshness of the air, dry and moist ever at play; but if a tear were
still, made of gelid calm and hazy ice, only dimly translucent and obscured by Time,
then it would be the same shape as these pebbles here...

I didn’t cry. As I walked on, the river made a shushing sound as if to beckon
from afar and say:

“Though the Lake be there and I here far away,
yet I flow through it to your feet and feel them,
intimately, and when you lift them feel
the wayward canals winding under your boots,”

and I knew it could feel my toes also, the warmth of my socks slowly overtaken by by the vast, mild, welcoming cold. The water scaled my trousers with eager thirst, paralyzing for a moment every muscle in my knees and thighs and waist, climbing my vest and corduroy shirt all greed and anticipation, hungering for my tears–
then as if a far-off wolf’s-cry sent a chilly start through the lake’s spine,
the water slowed
and its white foam caressed my beard
softly,
with sweet merciless affection
and soaked it wet all in its meek surrender.
One would think the labyrinth of each ear and the tunnels of the nose would be
the biggest challenge,
navigating in the dark
such closed
and dry places, but
the cunning element invaded all in quick succession
and conquered them with stunning ease,
but my eyes!
As they faced the dull and misty vastness of the sky
whereon the lake’s countenance was in perfect mirror depicted
and her cruelty plain to see,
Again the foamy hands stopped
cold
froze
still
as if to wait
for a tear-shaped tear
breath held
in motu contrario
and scratchingly
screetchingly
crunching like
breaking glass
devoured the blushing of my cheeks
and broke the eyelids and eyelashes
into submission.

the white orbs
clear and veinless
in that terrible moment
offered good game
the shattering fluid searched them
sought their source
they gushed bright hot blood in response
burning the icy water off
but as a band of heroes fighting off a host
it cooled in weariness and froze to dissolution in fatigue
and gave way to the waters

the iris
scorched green and radiant
by the acts of bloodshot fear
played her due part
admirably
her magic powers all unleashed
her shield a maze of infinite space
woodland and plains
rolling grass and gnarling trees
a world’s width
of creatures secret and horrible
and the forces of unnature in their swift command
but the waters saw the trick
and gave painful birth to their imaginable infiniteness as well
filled all the greenworld to the skies and beyond
and overflowed the emerald spectral crown

yet
the pupil
the most tiny innumerable part
like the centre of a vicious vortex stood aloof
of conquering,
its microscopic rim
voracious
gulping down gallon after gallon after gallon
a dent in the space of time
the earth’s surface bent as if the plates
had made way
and the icy lake was sinking to its boiling doom
the horrid whirlpool gorging on water, fish, and twig alike–

and then the pebbles,
when their turn came,
came gently crushing on the frigid limbs,
gently crushing muscles, arteries, and bones in sweet concord, (like hot sensual tears begot of a hyperrealist’s temperatureless reasoning,) and all the organs, stomach, spleen, kidneys and liver, lungs, brain; but not my heart:

Therein they made friends and entered freely,
able (all senses lost to the fight)
to take the guise and pretense of real tears.