for Jim Spates
I am haunted by this memory of the falls:
The turbulent water with its bloom of froth
Hung like a curtain, still
Changeless and invariable;
Yet spat and spumed, dripped and cascaded, gushed –
Eased itself of the burden the great lakes
Had urged upon it. Also,
Viewed from the side, it stood
From the rock wall like a sheer and polished pane
At the top curved and stooping to the plunge –
To the deep catastrophe
That shattered it – and then
Rebounded back as star-flung spray, a deathless
Tower of it, rising, as if in worship –
*
Did Jackson Pollock
when he painted One
know the Lord’s beauty by it?
What we call
randomness –
the white stream
lashed over brown and purple
sprayed and flecked –
not at all
deep canyons of the underself
but the order in which things fall
or what intelligence will make of them.
Draped from the rock it
frills but falls:
the same pattern, never
the same water.
You will find
(I must tell you)
no great man
not a man of law.
*
Further downstream we had paused at other falls:
Slight trickles, graceful cataracts, rapids, weirs,
The still rock around which
A rope of current tugged
And, frothing from some ledge, a watery fringe
Of tasselled elegance. Each one of them,
For all the vehement clamour,
Displayed rule and design;
Though they fell, they fell by the same laws,
And all such law breeds pattern. This one, however,
Was quite another thing:
A gulf in the earth’s crust,
Chaos to us – ocean or milky way –
And order, therefore, in the larger mind.
*
the sun and the other stars
the beating heart
the snow-melt
driven, crying
of this steep place afraid
the common pass
but fraying there
the vast drum of woven stuff unwinding,
the dripped lace
no measure fine enough
eye or finger or numerate brain
immutable change
made and remade
laws finer than any known of men
from things made
being seen and understood
the invisible things
each frill and fibre
eternal power