Nude Descending an Empire

Blue Heron

63 Blue Heron 1. By the stiletto stillness of her legs, the day is staked down, a green blaze orbiting her white-blue flame. If that is instinct, wow— to have an instinct for so much calm! Not these other birds twittering and rappelling restlessly from tree to tree, or these insects awhirr in ceaseless machinations, the bees working over the white heads of yarrow, the gyrating clouds of flies and gnats, but to stand in one spot nearly the whole day gazing into the day reflected on the deep green shimmering silk of the pond’s skin and into that other day, rising from its muckraked depth— 64 shadowy, elusive. Neck arched forward, supple and taut, waiting for dinner, fish flash or shadow, to crest. But sometimes so still it seems she must be waiting for something else to rise, a word, a light-riven cry, sometimes she must not be gazing into the pond at all. 65 2. A heron has moved into the top pond. It’s not like when a beaver gnaws in or when one more fish spills down from the creek in the spring flood. It’s as if a person moved in was sleeping there at the pond’s side waking to the infinite sky there the whole day leaning over the water’s face, shaving, making tea, taking notes. Except not a person. A presence large and still and alone that requires space. As if the pond now belonged to the one who was watching it. So you approach with care pause in a patch of bee-humming lupine. You watch her watching, perched above the pond standing in the middle of the sky the whole green day which is real and in reference to no thing 66 And if you go closer, and she flies off to a dead tree, a zone away you feel the weight of so much watching fall upon you waiting to be filled. 67 3. So you walk forward into the void the heron has left into this one secret, waving, trembling in the green-red grass in the devil’s paintbrush and stalks of yarrow, in the lilting drift and topography of a cloud, in the mountains of spruce spread upright in the sun. This day which is not going anywhere, not becoming another day, not becoming night, just becoming itself, again, darkening, contracting, swelling, brightening shivering, flooding with cold stars as an organ floods with blood. Are you watching? 68 4. When a heron appears it is like a revelation. Years later you realize what the heron reveals what any revelation reveals is the day itself what has always been revealed. The day stands on a thin strip of an island in the middle of a river that does not exist. ...