After a Long Illness

Johnson, VT

At night the river,    frozen over, fits

its bed like a key    its lock. The current

keeps turning but    the surface won’t

open. I can    hear ice click, shift,

its crystalline pins    caught. Twenty-odd miles

downstream from Lake    Eden, its origin,

the Gihon’s near its end:    after the old red mill,

before it enters    the Lamoille, it falls

flat, a closed    door. Wrong key

in the wrong lock,    I like to put

my mind where two worlds    meet and agree to

disagree. The teachers    say: take up the water,

make it your body    and mind, make it thought.

But I think I    must think the way

elements make    temporary

arrangements    with weather—

oxygen and    hydrogen lock

their electrons and    expand, a lattice

of tetrahedrons.    All their new shapes make

ephemeral color    the way what light there is

at midnight heightens    ice, brighter briefly

than snow. And toward    that whiteness my mind

pushes outward from    the interior

where olivine water    washes over gravel

and sand. Thought    exerts drag

against the icy    underside, and I

feel a border    experience

can’t cross over    into knowledge

the way in front    of paradox

my mind stops:    for five years

my body killed me    and kept me alive.

Bare berry brambles    on the bank catch snow

weighted with rain    that falls straight down,

hissing as it hits    the ice. Who am I

now. Above: mountains.    Below: the river.

Both moving and still,    inaccessible

and everywhere, being    is and keeps to itself,

hidden in emblems    of the outward, seeds

extracted from bracts    of a dry pine cone.

The spring equinox    is near—rain coaxes

the icy lattices    to relax into lapse,

little cracks    mid-river.

It’s so quiet    I hardly feel

desire. But its soft force    flenses the strongest

water from thaw—there    at the thinnest brink,

kinesis that    resists stillness,

thinking on thinking,    the current pulses.