Across The Brown River

The Brown River, finger of a broken fist,
Moved sluggish through the woods and dust.
We made a bridge of the crashed oak, dancing over
the limbs like monkeys or lovers,
eschewing the deeps with our eyes;
For on the other side they said lay paradise.

It was a modern replica, built by the offspring of some rich
Dog-like dowager-some son-of-a-bitch
Who like formal gardens of paths and shaven trees,
Hedges in a maze and many elegant statues.
I looked long at “The Girl With Silk,” a stone queen
With legs apart but draped in the nick of time between.

The most expressive statuary was “The Last
Centaur Expiring,” his face folded on his breast
All the segment that was a man pleading love
And fatal attraction for the brutal half.
A visitor beside grew incensed
At miscegenation, and spoke out against.

I walked away alone, over the fallen oak,
Into the woods. From the woods outside of Eden came
a snake.
I found no principle of evil here except
Two well-dressed women halted as they stepped,
Binoculars fixed on birds escaping in the trees
These eyes from outer space, evicted statues.

–Galway Kinnell

—

The Dry Salvages
(No. 3 of ‘Four Quartets’)

I do not know much about gods; but I think that the river
Is a strong brown god—sullen, untamed and intractable,
Patient to some degree, at first recognised as a frontier;
Useful, untrustworthy, as a conveyor of commerce;
Then only a problem confronting the builder of bridges.
The problem once solved, the brown god is almost forgotten
By the dwellers in cities—ever, however, implacable.
Keeping his seasons and rages, destroyer, reminder
Of what men choose to forget. Unhonoured, unpropitiated
By worshippers of the machine, but waiting, watching and waiting.
His rhythm was present in the nursery bedroom,
In the rank ailanthus of the April dooryard,
In the smell of grapes on the autumn table,
And the evening circle in the winter gaslight.

The river is within us, the sea is all about us;
The sea is the land’s edge also, the granite
Into which it reaches, the beaches where it tosses
Its hints of earlier and other creation:
The starfish, the horseshoe crab, the whale’s backbone;
The pools where it offers to our curiosity
The more delicate algae and the sea anemone.
It tosses up our losses, the torn seine,
The shattered lobsterpot, the broken oar
And the gear of foreign dead men. The sea has many voices,
Many gods and many voices.
The salt is on the briar rose,
The fog is in the fir trees.
The sea howl
And the sea yelp, are different voices
Often together heard: the whine in the rigging,
The menace and caress of wave that breaks on water,
The distant rote in the granite teeth,
And the wailing warning from the approaching headland
Are all sea voices, and the heaving groaner
Rounded homewards, and the seagull:
And under the oppression of the silent fog
The tolling bell
Measures time not our time, rung by the unhurried
Ground swell, a time
Older than the time of chronometers, older
Than time counted by anxious worried women
Lying awake, calculating the future,
Trying to unweave, unwind, unravel
And piece together the past and the future,
Between midnight and dawn, when the past is all deception,
The future futureless, before the morning watch
When time stops and time is never ending;
And the ground swell, that is and was from the beginning,
Clangs
The bell.

–T.S. Eliot

—

Flowers By The Sea

When over the flowery, sharp pasture’s
edge, unseen, the salt ocean

lifts its form—chicory and daisies
tied, released, seem hardly flowers alone

but color and the movement—or the shape
perhaps—of restlessness, whereas

the sea is circled and sways
peacefully upon its plantlike stem

–William Carlos Williams