Seams Sept 3rd, 2006

A bowl of green fir trees surrounds me as I lie by the wine dark river looking at the seam at the water’s edge where rock and sedge meet their reflection. They are so perfectly matched that only the wind can tell the difference. The seam tantalizes me as a place with an answer to mirror images and opposites, the place between worlds, free of the pull of good and bad.

Some say the world was made by great benevolence and so it seems here. There is only me, the bear scat, the dog, the rocks and sunlight, a merganser quacking by, a vagrant wind toying with giant fir limbs blowing the early autumn leaf fall upstream and stirring the river with a symphony of tessellated waves in a blurring green, mauve and ebony.

I hear no starving babies cries nor see the scorched earth around my house, nor the broken bleeding bodies fertilizing the earth. Yet they are in this moment as well and the seam between water and rock has finally has no answer.

Some say all our questions will be answered at death--that is the seam we are seeking, in this seamless world of opposites from which we long often to escape

The poem slips through the fingers of my mind and floats away from me. The only exit deep inside.