Still Water
Prose Poems
Copyright @ 1989 by Arthur Garfunkel
ISBN 0-525-24795-5
Used by persmission of Author - All Rights Reserved
9
There is a law to the descent.
First are the
duck-pearl darts of purist light,
a morning play in a glacial
lake,
trapped by the Alps at the top
of the Albula Pass.
I make my resolve.
Then look up
to see mountain scree
and the beautiful alluvial
fan.
Scaleless.
Now begin the
succulents. Antlered to
the earth, following their
spring
fed courses—mountain
gorse
amid the stone-gray world,
they introduce autumnal
colors, tart in their
translucence.
The water
falls on tumbled rocks.
Foam in light.
Bedazzling.
The eye of
the mind is the home of delight.
The face of the soul.
The humbling book.
Who can
retell the pleasure of the look below?
What media coverage—the
darting
communion, the retinal
flow—
newsworthy scan of the scale
of the air-blue valley below?
The skin of
rock is hid beneath the forest now.
The road and I in midlife
bisect the
pine trees' tilted field. Like
Apollo following Daphne
trapped in trees
I too pine for Her
in the ventilating cool.
Beneath the
verdant brow, with drying teartracks
braided on my cheek, I break
the invocation in the clear.
Caroling
Bruegheling
Allawalt!
Merovingian
images…holiest history,
These are the upper meadows—
Albula
Pass, Switzerland September 1983