Pool
May 2 2014


Sitting at the river's edge
where it quickens, sharply bends,
slip-streams rocks
eddies in back of them.
Chatters against the outside bank,
carving
into hard glacial till.

The sound of moving water
has always comforted men.
All day, you can sit
and it's inexhaustible,
like an hourglass
that never runs down.
As if time had stopped, and you could endlessly watch
hypnotically gurgling by.
Forgetting how
in the doldrums of summer
it nearly runs dry.

And where it widens
running smooth and quiet
you could swear it was still,
a secluded pool
brooding
in its cool black depths.

Mostly, I'm the rapids,
my life, white water

racing quickly past.

My attention scattered
except for brief flashes
of recognition.
A kind of funnel, sieving through
my tightly cupped hands,

grasping
at what seemed to matter, then.

But when I mind
I'm the container.
Diving all the way down,
feeling blindly
through drowned branches

silt and sand

airless mud.
River rock
the eons wore smooth.

Where flotsam and jetsam
drift slowly downstream.
Their barely discernible motion
the only way I know
that even here, time flows,
the hourglass
inexorably empties.

On a recent episode of CBC radio's cultural showpiece "Q", regular contributor Torquil Campbell reflected unhappily on the ubiquitous smart phone, mourning how we are increasingly allowing ourselves to be distracted to death, to become more and more "narcissistic and stupid" (his words, not mine!)

He spoke eloquently about how our devices interrupt, intrude, disrupt; how they take away those empty moments of clarity and reflection and introspection and interior stillness. And how we construct a self-referential, self-affirming on-line universe that reflects exactly who we are, and so deprive ourselves of serendipity, of a wider world. (All this is paraphrase and near quote, listening again to the podcast as I write; so all credit to Campbell for all of the above.)

The analogy that really struck me was this: "you are creating yourself (sic) as a funnel instead of a container":  passively and impotently watching as life pours by; all surface, little depth.  Perhaps not many of us are inclined to introspection; but pretty much everyone is too rushed, time-starved, terminally busy for it anyway. I have the privilege of time; and I'm very much inclined to the interior life. This poem is an expression of gratitude for that. This is interwoven with a rumination on perceptions of time, as well as the existential dilemma of mortality.

Of course, I don’t have a smart phone, live most of the time where internet is unavailable, and prefer solitude. So perhaps I’m living proof of his thesis:  that cutting oneself off from the distraction and intrusion of this ubiquitous connectivity opens up space.

I love rivers, and water is a powerful recurring trope in my work. Especially how they run and run, seemingly inexhaustible. I spent the best years of my young adult life kayaking white-water, canoeing the back country. So it was pretty inevitable that funnel and container would transmogrify in a small rapid and a still pool.

The river bottom is a metaphor for psychological depth: the accumulation of silt, the darkness of mud, the dead airless things you keep as secrets. And the jagged edges, smoothed by time. When Campbell first said funnel, I saw water rushing through it. And then I saw an hourglass with its clear constricted middle, sand speeding up as it funnels into the pinch:  measuring time, while watching your life race by.

(An apology to the pedantic and punctilious reader, who will realize that jetsam is the stuff that flows just beneath the surface; so I suppose it's really only flotsam you can watch float slowly downstream! But "flotsam" doesn't seem to work without the whole familiar expression; so "flotsam and jetsam" it is. As well, I've gone and interrupted the "colour" series. Which may or may not be at an end. Time will tell.)