Not far from the source
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Shadows sweep past imprecisely as in
dreams of being underwater but able to
breathe down there like the trout that are
hunting the caddis flies fidgeting now on
the sunlit surface of White Salmon River
where it quietly glides under this sturdy
little bridge on which my beauteous wife,
my beastly dog, and I are standing on this
summer morn, Hope and I regarding these
pristine waters only two miles downstream
from their purified source where it surges
at fifty thousand gallons per minute from
far underground out of the porous volcanic
rock, a virgin spring not unlike the one in
which fair Diana bathed when Actaeon the
hunter surprised her from the shadows so
that the goddess transformed the mortal
man into a stag to be brought down and
slaughtered by his own dogs or actually
more like the chaste clarity here in which
dark Dhyana now charms bright Action
and metamorphoses him thereby into me
whom my long-tongued guard-dog Boris
tenderly loves; the undulant shadows just
barely gurgle along the glassy margins of
the gradual current down here where the
stream has flattened out onto its marshy
edges aesthetically in the sunshine while
my wife and I stand light-footed now and
hand-in-hand on this span of witnessing
and observe the motion of morning in
these mountains just a little bit north of
Wovoka Butte in between Mt. Whitman
and Mt. Jefferson with the moonbeams
passing back and forth between us and
within through our clasped palms so that
we converse silently with locutions of
starlight in the vibrant inner darkness, to
wit my own cryptic: "The brutal angels of
eternity," then her worshipful: "The holy
voice serenely singing," followed by my
mournful: "An anti-intellectual randori of
sorts," met by her hopeful: "The divine as
expressed through these individualities,"
and so on, directing our remarks inaudibly
upstream together toward the source in a
lyrically spiritual syntax that one cannot
translate very well into our pragmatically
articulated language, reverently toward the
sacred void together that is the urge of the
cosmos and the origin of all creation, until
our Rottweiler telepathically reminds us:
"Do not forget the dog," which is always
sound advice and in this case leads us like
Zhuangzi's sage to lean at our ease on the
sun and moon and stars, to tuck the entire
universe under an arm, to merge ourselves
with the myriad separate things and the
fecund emptiness containing them, and to
accept the world's muddle just as it is.
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