In Knowing

You look out and all you see is blurred. There is distraction, but not a curiosity. You are through.

This poem is an allegory of the river and a life derailed. I have found that nothing gets life in focus more than facing a life thought near an end. Having been swept up in rapids during my years as a whitewater boater, I saw this as appropriate in explanation for the ups and downs of life and the challenges we all face.

--

When you look into the misty tomorrows
And yesterdays
When you dwell on the currents
Churning and turning to and away
Do you linger in the spell of dumbfounded hope
Or do you cast yourself into the rapids
And dash it all against rocks
Drown your desperation
Your fire
Your spirit
Curse at the canyons the river has carved
The horizon lines you see hinted at
Ahead of you
The falling, twisting and turning
That no longer matters
The weak arms and legs
That no longer listen to the pleas
Of a still fighting conscious

It does matter
You know now
It does
And you will do anything to be let go
From this place

A friends hand reaches out
A branch or log awaits you
Or a bend pushes you toward an eddy
You are free
You are no longer desperate
You are seeing
You now know what is important to you

You KNOW and there's nothing else holding you
You have your own rapids to make
Your own twists and bends to form
Your own canyons to carve

A little up the river

The farthest sight I see just
a little up the river
where birds speak in tongues,
and rapids laugh in spite of
my eyes on them.

Where, no matter how
curious the eye,
it is the sights of
littered destiny dashed on
waves of frothy possibility,
that days are met in endings brought
rushing to a stop.

Because to have a moment not
spent shamelessly,
you must hold onto it,
so it is not thrown
under the wheels of turning hours,
but instead can be nurtured to
aged significance.
Where each moments
crooked back has been bent over,
beard grown long,
and the wrinkled force
of nature fractured
on the face of its
lived importance.

It is then the eyes I was born too
do not blink,
do not see what I’ve taught them
to see,
do not glance aside afraid of,
bored of,
saddened by.

There are no tears of joy,
no tears of pain,
no nothing to shield the hand of
Nature’s painted moment.

Brush to canvas,
I am left to see
around the bend,
further up the river
to the very source of stream and
all the way back
to where we beget,
to where my body rests
to where I had
disembarked from time’s train.

Where the moon reaches down
for a drink of water
and her hourglassed-reflection
shimmers.

Where the jeweled fish leaps
for wounded meal
and crashes to the water.

To the farthest sight I see just
a little up the river,
to where birds speak in tongues,
and rapids laugh in spite of
my eyes on them.