If some regions of the brain are foreign
to others, as they say, this might explain
why my moods swing like hips in a hula dance:
now grumped, now chipper, now the essence
of cement, now a gushed river flow.
A woodland river. Green, brown and yellow
limn its banks: sprunt pines and bending sycamores,
song thrushes. It rushes for the shore
the way that urge surged through me, out my mouth
in sounds not half my own, when I burst forth
into song this morning in the kitchen.
There was no reason to sing. No one to listen.
Happiness comes on like a once-loved song
on the radio—played over in the mind once it’s gone.
Useless to follow. It doesn’t end, doesn’t start:
a river that twists and turns into the unsatnaved heart
of the woods which shift in their shade perpetually,
sunlight pooling in the heads of the trees
while a congregation of sound fills the air,
pulls the ear. Useless to ponder where
that happiness went to, where it had been:
I can’t even catch the dark-yellow-light-brown-flecked green
while I follow the many-voiced river through downs
and drumlins, rail stations at the border of town,
past warehouses, vast retail lots, car-stained
miles of suburban families detained
in dream homes. To apprehend such density
of life would be to hold fresh to memory
each page of each book on a full forty foot shelf.
The mind can’t keep up with itself
and I get lost in town—masonry changed by whims
of weather, helter-skelter buildings on thin
streets huddled together: granite and whinstone,
polished ashlar, red sandstone, blonde and brown stone,
many-sized windows numerous as rain-
drops in the air, each an eye cast on this drained
world, each an eye giving onto an inner
realm I peer into, staring at the décor
of strange rooms, going ‘ooohh’, ‘yuk’, or ‘hmm?’,
catching a glimpse of a grey cluttered room:
a woman at a desk, rubbing her aching neck,
her tired eyes, turning away from her book,
laptop, stacked plates and cups, scribbled words,
turning away from this tasked world towards
an inner realm: her thoughts like quicksilver shoals
in motion through a green water-blue soul,
her eye a twilight moon over this wood’s
gushing river that I follow under the mood
swings of sycamores, fearful of the pines,
wondering where on earth does the time
go while the weather turns and cold winds
ruffle the witch hazel, rustle the whin,
wilting sweet gum. Smokebush withers.
Woodland thins. Crows caw and circle
the blush sky, mild above autumn’s
mown fields, borderlands, foreign regions
where the river, many rivers, empty
into a dark sea, the mind of nobody
where whatever it was that was borne in song
floats and dims on the brim of meaning.