February 27, 2009
Jiuzhaigou: China's Mystic Waters.
Those photos in the second link actually make me feel depressed for what humanity has done to the earth.
Camera angles have to be set just right to see the mystic light.
Absolutely amazing.
Just looking at them gives me a sense of peace. I'd never want to leave.
King of the River
If the water were clear enough,
if the water were still,
but the water is not clear,
the water is not still,
you would see yourself,
slipped out of your skin,
nosing upstream,
slapping, thrashing,
tumbling
over the rocks
till you paint them
with your belly's blood:
Finned Ego,
yard of muscle that coils,
uncoils.
If the knowledge were given you,
but it is not given,
for the membrane is clouded
with self-deceptions
and the iridescent image swims
through a mirror that flows,
you would surprise yourself
in that other flesh
heavy with milt,
bruised, battering toward the dam
that lips the orgiastic pool.
Come. Bathe in these waters.
Increase and die.
If the power were granted you
to break out of your cells,
but the imagination fails
and the doors of the senses close
on the child within,
you would dare to be changed,
as you are changing now,
into the shape you dread
beyond the merely human.
A dry fire eats you.
Fat drips from your bones.
The flutes of your gills discolor.
You have become a ship for parasites.
The great clock of your life
is slowing down,
and the small clocks run wild.
For this you were born.
You have cried to the wind
and heard the wind's reply:
"I did not choose the way,
the way chose me."
You have tasted the fire on your tongue
till it is swollen black
with a prophetic joy:
"Burn with me!
The only music is time,
the only dance is love."
If the heart were pure enough,
but it is not pure,
you would admit
that nothing compels you
any more, nothing
at all abides,
but nostalgia and desire,
the two-way ladder
between heaven and hell.
On the threshold
of the last mystery,
at the brute absolute hour,
you have looked into the eyes
of your creature self,
which are glazed with madness,
and you say
he is not broken but endures,
limber and firm
in the state of his shining,
forever inheriting his salt kingdom,
from which he is banished
forever.
--Stanley Kunitz
Robert's Lake
Michael McFee
Less a lake than a homemade pond, less a pond
than a big muddy puddle locals mocked as "Bob's,"
nevertheless my sister dragged the family there
and landed a crappie and managed to get it home
alive enough to plop in tap water in the bathtub,
naming it "Robert" after its place of origin—
a Biblical fish, or Scottish, Robert McRoberts.
It (or, briefly, he) swam a few wobbly victory laps
then rose to the surface sideways, floating, stilled,
so dad scooped him up and bore him to the toilet
and Robert circled the porcelain vigorously
on his way down and out of this dazzling world,
leaving our neighborhood, Royal Pines, never really
regal or (once cleared for houses like ours) piney,
joining the French Broad (so called not for a dame
but for settlers) just before the shallow river passed
below Robert's Lake, a modest body of water
that was home to our modest fish for a little while,
its name his memorial, as every name is: an epitaph,
a plot in the map's cemetery, the briefest elegy.
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