Some People Like To Take A Water Droplet
Some people like to take a water droplet
and turn it into a haiku.
Some people like to write
like the loose thread
of a quick-witted alpine stream
trying to unravel the mountain all the way down
with dazzle and flash.
But when I shoot my mouth off
about what I don't know about nightingales
it always comes out ice-hot stars
above a rush of northern rivers,
the Mackenzie, the Fraser, the Thompson
and when I want to risk
my cowboy B.C. French in public,
the Gulf of St. Lawrence.
Some people like to weave their mindstreams
into lakes with their third eyes open
to the flight of the white clouds
and the sky that doesn't inhibit them,
but me I like to flow and fall and crush
swell and fork, shift, shape, loop, swerve,
destroy, nourish, and change course
like the Ottawa or the Skeena
in the May spring run off
when the ice floes and weight-lifting waters
are flexing their muscles
in powerfully sculpted anthracite and jade.
A river, yes, blackwater and white alike;
what could be more
quintessentially Canadian than that?
A river as inhospitable and bleak as the Arctic
toward life in its beginnings,
and still as wild and dangerous as Hell's Gate
as it approaches the sea
after many perils and epiphanies.
I am the sorcerer's apprentice
when it comes to rivers
but I like to go with the flow, the power, the depth
the cosmic expansion of their homelessness,
the cataracts and wetlands of their manic mood swings,
the way they uproot and sustain,
carve traffic islands out of granite
and tear down bridges in their path
and then slow down mellifluously
to let a doe come out of the woods to drink
from the reflection of the way the water sees her.
I give the orange spruce root rot in rusty shallows
and strip the bark from defrocked trees
the herons nest in like a brain trust.
Grizzly, moose, cougar, wolf,
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poem by Patrick White
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