Starting at the pinnacle,
ice-held and wind-whipped,
threading through the solid planes of years,
caught now in pits, now caves, now eddies
of froth like lace or quiet muddied pools,
making its way from ordered lines to whorls,
down gutters other, older flows have wrought
in fossiled rock, inscribing them with grit
and vestiges, to finishes unknown
at bottom, long lax lake or stifling dam,
fishless or filled with tadpoles, algae, trout
—whatever stops the overarching flow’s
mysterious course is not for me
to guess; each slip of tongue and shining length
and glassy skein that swings from bank to bank,
slaps into dark obstructions, crashes, breaks,
and hurtles, faster waters at its back
turns into sounds: a low, insistent drawl
of water rippling slow to cross a wake,
the high cries when it hits the hardest rocks
or bursts into a fan of foam in air,
the minor murmurs, major fluted leaps
in choral pairs, the wavering water strings
looped over crannies, tightened on thin stones
while underneath, a range of lower notes
now integral, now hidden, harbored, drawn,
withdrawn, or pulled to fuller pools below
before it mingles, rises, circles, falls
continually; and of the lofty height
where it began, that iced and thin-aired peak
I started from, I can’t hear anything:
the wellspring’s real, just as the finish is
but from right here, those seem like vision, silence.