Inexhaustible

Sept 26 2019

The creek

burbling over polished rocks

gurgles

               . . . tinkles

                                   . . . tumbles.

Its sound fills in the night,

giving substance

to one-dimensional dark,

the flattening

of shadow and murk.

Enough

to reconstruct the world

using only our ears.

Complete

with us at its centre,

moving in step

as we make our way.

The trees that border the path

are a scrim of deeper darkness

superimposed

upon the dark.

And moving at a steady pace

unconscious of our gait

they could be painted onto scrolls

in shades of grey and black

unspooling as we stand;

like Newtonian objects

in a frictionless world,

where constant motion

is no different than being at rest.

How is it

that this creek is inexhaustible,

flowing from some distant height

water from the earth?

That falls

according to gravity's inviolable law,

but unlike the apple

never stops;

a plume of silty water

diffusing out

into the vast cold lake;

its molecules infinitely mixed,

its earthy essence spent.

They say a river is never the same

in the same place twice,

and this is even truer

when all you do is listen.

Until, as we amble along

the creek's no longer heard,

our accommodating ears

distracted self-absorption.

And because, in the fullness of time

even beauty jades us,

our sense of wonder lost

some minor flaw magnified.

And because we are, by nature, disruptive,

the clump-clump-clump of feet

our nattering chattering tongues.

But long after we're gone

the creek still runs;

its gentle burbling

as if sound had substance,

its music still with me

as darkness descends

and I drift downstream in slumber.

That night, it was the sound of the creek that stuck with me. I think because, having to focus on conversation, my usual visual engagement with my surroundings kind of involuted in until we were enclosed in a small dark sphere. (I wasn't even paying attention to the dogs, who usually entertain me.) Sound, however, is the most powerful and primordial sense:  it penetrates, even when you are concentrated elsewhere. And somehow, hearing the creek, it not only gave a dimensionality to that blackness, but it conjured the entire surroundings -- without even looking up. Which is where this poem began.