Nothing You Can Do Will Save You
The Buddha had his river, just for now this one is mine,
my eternal, my mighty little bit of
river, I’m not going anywhere,
I’m not doing anything,
everything that’s happening has already and will again, sometime
soon—
I’ll just watch nightfall come on, the invisible become invisible,
the conjunction of dark and darkness
in the twirl and lessening—in the scrawl and rivulet
of current
I’ll be shadow, I’ll be reflection, I’ll be all that
I don’t get to understand.
That’s the world ahead of me—out there—before reflection, birds calling back into
the wind and windlessness, insects brushing up against
the silklike,
animals breathing at the surface, figures loose oblongs,
the effect of one color upon and in another, this and the many other greens
Ming, Milano, pond scum,
flotsam, lily and the old French names: merde d’oye, terre verte, feuille morte.
The mind, ma pensée, the phenomena of thinking
—motion, texture, color, tone.
These trees are turning wetter, bigger in the dark, painted
that way, they dissolve
again into the water, surface, color overlaying color,
black in the green, a little bit of yellow ochre in it
on the south shore, a tiny bonfire to go with laughter.
Before this, all along, birds vibrant, expansive, resonant, keeping track
of the wind at my back, over and around, through and in
the trees, the seen, the unalienable landscape, boughs in the air, becoming air,
every each becoming all
in motion ongoing & in stillness.
This, my tiny landscape, therein my uncertainty—
what I don’t know about what I know.
It’s said there’s nothing you can do—
I know, there’s no answer up there, above,
just this, right here, the river fringe:
petals, pollen, feathers, ash—
mine divine approximation
and like and as and like and as
