paines creek - dennis flats

ten thousand years

Delhi, New York, January, 1998

In a cabin, in a chasm
of a mountain brook, its waterfall
hip high on its way to the farm land it goes
to the valley of the river running full below.

Ten thousand years the brook cascades past,
ten thousand drops a second together splash,
rushing, sliding, smoothing the brownstone footprint
of an ancient ocean fossil, scalloping the layers,
splitting slabs at right angles, scouring
an inch a century,
carving the depth of a man or woman and more,
from then to now.

We are visitors.

The brook connects the earth and sky
and swallows us up. There is a taste in the air
that settles like a bubble in the hollow
removed by ten millennia of rain and snow.

We come to fill our ears and spirit like vessels with water:
millions of molecules descending sparkling,
crystal ice, cold, wet, soughing in the dark like the night wind
as they course through our sleep, flowing
like another time, a time calling to us to stop
and smell the mosses, the mushrooms, the mildew, even
in the tissue box, a time to daydream
swept away in the water image depth of source
with surface merge of mirror, bottom rock
and liquid in between.

But who for long can see all three at once?

Here in the fourth dimension, the present whispers as a backside chill:
"Time to put the night log on," and I do and then
the boiling hiss of wet wood and flickering flame vapor speak:
"We have ancestors and posterity met here now."