Rivers Mighty

There is beautiful land here: the Columbia gorge, the Willamette (the river why?), Mount St. Helens, Mount Rainier, the Olympics, the Cascades, the Issaquah Ridge, the national forests, the stony refusal of nature to comply with silly roads and forested towns, the bays and ocean vistas, the lakes and river curlicues – how arabesque and wavy is our world, like a dervish dance spinning or the sinuous shapes of ancient eastern art, twisting and rolling like the waves and the snakes, and the wind eddying around the minarets and parapets of time.

But every string I’ve seen possesses both beginning and end, end and beginning, even the wind whispering and the ocean waves singing, even the dreams I’m clinging to, with distant, foggy shores. Some metaphysical kitten plays with the sweater-threads of my life, gnawing, clawing, fraying its unravelling strings and deftly splitting the colors into a mess of sudden ends and new. And though it is a sweater no longer, I’m beginning to believe it’s beautiful, nonetheless. Perhaps more so, with its spontaneous elegance, an arbitrary truncation into a colorful next – a rough patch in a river makes the river leap, and where water falls, rainbows spring.

Is the river’s might in raging rapids,

smoothing the stones and leveling mountains?

or in the width of its waters gently

etching a means towards eternal seas?

perhaps her strength lies in a sleight of hand

breaking boulders into sand and hiding

around clever bends, tracing the moon’s path

through desert, forest, fields, and quiet hearts.

but no matter where it goes, it’s coming

home again, racing to the end, he sways,

tipsy and tired – greeting the ocean

with sad smiles, wondering now and then,

how poignant the sunrise and set can be,

even here, even now, even eventually

http://benjaminwblog.com/2014/06/rivers-mighty/