Down By The River Again

Down by the river again
listening for stars to interrupt my solitude
like the first little nicks of rain to strike a windowpane,
I realize how much I prefer a magnanimous liar
to the tale of a man with a stingy truth
so much so I’m generous in my sorrow
with all things that suffer as I do
however dangerous and estranged
tomorrow might causally seem.

The latest casualty of a dream I had,
I sit down on a prophetic skull of an Olmec rock
surrounded by broken beer bottles,
that remind me of withered waterlilies in the fall
and the cracked shells of cosmic eggs
that took the plunge into the abyss
to test fly the flightfeathers of a new universe
like a baby sparrow on the edge of a nest in the abyss.

My mindstream mingles with the night creek
and we both flow by like avatars of time
wondering what oceanic theme
we might be the tributaries of
as we watch the willows wash their roots
with their hair, and the stars
dip their lures in the water
to catch the silver fish that school on the moon
like a poet and a modest river
that can’t find any room for their emotions
stranded on the earth like wingless waterbirds.

Down by the river again, it’s easier
to share my pain with a restless companion
in constant change like the moodring of the moon
than it is the meteoritic flash and bling
of the ceremonious cornerstones of life
who might give good advice to a building
like the Kaaba or the black Taj Mahal,
but know nothing about walking
on quicksand and water or stars
without sinking like most of the living
through the fathomless depths of their seeing.

Or the aboriculture of the orchards of rootless trees
tasting the fruits of their wanderlust
like the sad sweetness of farewell on their tongues
as they pass through the gates of becoming
the same way they came yesterday
like sad poems falling from the wings of waterbirds.
Sacred syllables pearling off their feathers
like a windfall of pear-shaped tears in the moonlight.

Down by the river again I can dazzle my sorrow
with the beauty of a fleeting insight
into the nature of enlightened fireflies
that can light up the whole universe
in a single flash of compassion
for everything in passage that can’t last
if it doesn’t fall out of formation with the past
like Canada geese on a return journey
to the lakes and rivers that don’t hang on
to their reflections in the well-thumbed holy books
of family albums any longer than it takes
for them to be on their way again
and gone, gone, gone, altogether gone beyond
the dark hills that keep their secrets to themselves.

Down by the river again, I can commune
with all the burnt bridges of my long firewalks
through my nebulous heart trying to break into stars
so I can find my way home again
without consulting a starchart of fireflies
where X marks the spot of my biggest mistakes
when I knocked on a plague door from the inside
and the angel of death answered like a distant memory:
Get out. No one lives here anymore.
And the pain was almost more than I could bear.

Down by the river again, I can let my dreams
and my nightmares alike flow downstream
like the blossoms of the moon or the feathers
of a my imaginative flight path into an oceanic awareness
there are no trees, there are no branches
there are no seas on the moon or in the abyss
and the waterbirds have nowhere to land,
nowhere to nest, not even the sprigs of peace
they carry in their beaks like divining rods
to anywhere within their starless wingspan.

Down by the river again, it’s enough
that what I am answers to itself even
when the nightbird of my longing
comes looking for me like a rootless tree
it used to roost in like a voice from the past
that keeps mistaking me for someone
it’s the foolishness of a sacred clown to still hope I am.
And what can I know about what I’m becoming
except it’s the sum of all I’ve forgot
to keep pace with the flowing
where the shapeshifters wait at the river’s turning
for a thought to tilt its wings up
in a good-bye remember me if you can
sloppy kind of salute or awkward bow
from all of us whose names
have been written on the wind and water in blood
to all those lightwaves and flash floods of the heart
standing at attention like a parade square
where war’s never been declared
and head toward home like an arrow
that’s lost its sense of direction
and falls like an illegal immigrant toward earth.

Down by the river again, where change
comes as effortlessly as the fallen leaf
of an apostate hymnal of protest songs, caught up in
the currents, the undertow, the vertigo, the delirium,
the rapids and vapid swamplands of time,
no one claims me, and nothing is mine
and there’s a silence that screams
the birthright of my freedom at the stars
and holds up my severed umbilical cord
as proof I’ve escaped my immortal chains
and chosen this transient path, brief as it is,
of light and wind, root and rain,
the circuitous blossoming of the wild grapevines
wandering like dancing drunks all over the place
underneath the fruits by which we shall know them
like chandeliers of global streetlamps
shining like clusters of pearls in the Pleiades.

Down by the river again, contemplating the world
like an earthbound frog sitting on a cosmic lily pad,
feeling the ghost pains of old wounds
summoned to a seance of scars
like a retrograde excorcism of all life on Mars,
wondering if the surest proof
that life on earth first came here
from that angry libidinous planet
like a seed in the fist of a meteor,
is that life on earth has been at war ever since.

Or if it’s too much bliss, or a surfeit of sorrows
that keeps the bubbles of the multiverse
in the rivers I’ve followed into hyperspace like
the inconceivable tomorrows
of the lonely predecessor of my own dragon line
that’s an affable familar with the same starmap on
the palm of my hand, as it holds
like the triune stigmata of serpent fire and snake-eyes
of two black pearls of wisdom and one mystic eclipse
of a new moonrise in the crescents of its triadic claws.

Down by the river again, where my wounds
attend night school in the lecture halls of my heart
and vast significance is explained away
with the whisper of a cool breeze, a gust of stars,
the flaring of a matchbook of daylilies,
goose-bumps on the bare arms of the river,
and the wild white iris doesn’t disguise itself as a truce
when it’s really a surrender, the sacred silence of the dusk
is animated by a cloud of unknowing gnats
that makes me wonder what they’re the aura of
if not the rapture of love that surrounds
the same galaxy of cosmic insights and earthly emotions
my heart has been haunting for lightyears
like the distant lustre of Venus shining like nacreous dawn
under the heavy eyelids of the dusty sunset
nodding off like a spectrograph under the weight
of the longer wavelengths of the red poppies
it’s been consulting all day like the green skulls
of gypsy fortune-tellers prophesying the death of stars
that go supernova like nocturnal nightlilies
along the riverways and dirt backroads of the Milky Way
like sleepwalkers in a dream lingering
over the darkening hills of the Lanark Highlands
like an extended metaphor for life, love, and death
that’s been trying to keep pace with a sunflower
that blooms at midnight, without running out of breath.

Down by the river again, where I can drown
in the endless baptismal fount of my own myth of origin,
without entering a womb like an unclean thing
asked to wash off the starmud of my afterbirth
like something dirty on the threshold of a shrine of life
I’m asked to leave outside and turn my back
on all the roads and dead end pilgrimages it took to get here,
I refuse to start any new incarnation with an act of betrayal,
and I won’t sanctify a saint without lifting the curse
off an heretical dragon’s back at the same time,
knowing that for every angel that falls from heaven
like rain to put this hell on earth out,
a demon rises from pandemonium up the burning ladders
of their skeletal remains like watersnakes
on the fire-escapes of emergency moonlight,
to get a rise out of heaven, and warm things up a bit
just to show it that wildflowers can bloom in fire as well
and it doesn’t hold a monopoly on bells
that have been beaten out of the afterlives
of experienced swords that have been through the forge
like hot blood through the heart of a warrior poet
who’s gone absent without permission
like the rogue star of a conscientious objector for good
from nightwatch in the guardhouse at the gates of Eden.