At Land's End in San Francisco
surging waves assault the shore
as if wanting to overthrow the
static ideas on our static land.
Bucking hard and heavy against sky,
against low fog, into the brine-spiced
blue above, their liquid restlessness
brokers a truce with my own.
And far upstream—past the wastelands
of Nevada, poems of scorched loneliness
exhaling into distant purplish mountains;
past the rivers prophesying green through
the red canyons of the American West
and the cattle towns accreting into
banal service industry outposts—
past all this something humble is trickling back toward those waves.
This is where the headwaters are found,
back in the little creeks of Montana.
Things are nonlinear up there
because that's how headwaters are:
the source of things is generally
known by its perplexing reversals
and rather unpromising promises.
You want to know, to ask real questions?
Then know that real answers are only seen
out of sight, you are safe only when you
are lost, and to find yourself you must founder at the headwaters of all.
Up in Hyalite Canyon trees twist
their tortured way out of the earth,
dwarfed beneath granite cliffs and the flinty sky of January. One wonders, looking at these trees whose gnarled bark gently holds snow: Why does growth hurt so terribly? And why
does it take such uncanny, mesmerizing forms?
We must endure such things, it seems,
for we are consigned to parables.
In wintertime, the headwaters are reduced to drips. Why? They are gathering snowpack
that will gush generously over the dry farmland in the coming months of summer. But presently the creek that thought it was ready to launch joyously
over the cliff is frozen in midair, an ice staircase,
a curve that never made it over.
This monstrous pause is winter's merciful fermentation. The frozenness at the headwaters of your being, where what you have lost
rips at the soft skin of all your secrets,
is slowly gathering what you will need
for a task you have not yet received.
But now is the long nothing. Winter is a horribly long time and time is the most unbearable of burdens. Yet it is the King's court jester, telling a joke
about despair that in the latter days will jolt
us into sanity with the mercy we rejected
at the time we ceased being children.
Listen to the trickle beneath the ice-arrested creek. Listen to the waves at Land's End, a chutzpah more ancient than the world.
These things are not rushing away from you,
leaving you behind, forgotten, and dry.
They are rushing toward you.
How many ways do you need to hear
great myths slipping through the cracks
in order finally to believe they are true? How long must you stand and pray at the waters before abandoning your
childish sense of 'abandonment'
to their urgent presence?
For the earth shall be full of the knowledge
of the LORD as the waters cover the sea.
Lord of the waters I am here now again, a child's listening heart. I'm washed over now again by all your breakers and waves,
wading away from the shore
as my fear at last dissolves
in your riptide of love.