Encounter

ENCOUNTER


What is an impression worth?
A frog. And a jar of ruddy leeches.

When I see frog. I think "Frogs.
Frogs are good to think."
The matter of frog experience first floats,
Then sinks mostly unknowable, spuriously
Into the spawning pond of memory.
It's a rich seminal soup, full of eyes.
Magnified, each a natural universe.
These eyes are vocal once they spring
Breaking through the skins of things.
In season -- everywhere -- then they're out.

Wonders of compromise, they extend themselves
To bridge the poles of water world and padded land.
And the extensions can be perceived from the eyes
As orderly change, clear and strange,
As leggy fish with iguana tails,
As animals flying on all fours,
Fully outstretched, twice their size,
Jumping, climbing piggy-back,
Unabashedly clambering onto one another's backs,
Orange on orange, green on green,
Clinging colorfully, eyes bulging,
They seem a surprise even to themselves.

When they leap
From the dense compact of bone and skin,
The plastic tapestry
Takes shape,
As lightning bolts or spotted lilies on fresh
green waters.
Frogs.
Frogs are naturally good to think,
To take inside as part of insubstantial self,
Changing orders, cruising the classifications.


Their song defeats the ears, allegro!
The rhythmic noise communicates,
Encroaching on all other senses,
Setting forth Reverie.

Bullrushes,
Against the moon and stars,
Spiked grasses on the mirror lake,
Edging the weeds, where
Sedge-warblers are sleeping on blue eggs.

The scene you see cannot be forced,
Cannot be tidily arranged
By science or dulling habit.

My eyes within no longer truly see.
There they swim in thicker waters,
As comets,
Shooting the across neural galaxies,
Where they re-connect icons.
From a blade of grass, the rest:
The moon, Stars,
Pond

Echoing ripples across,
Shattering the constellations,
Ruffling the lily pad,
And its camping amphibious motility.

Making the connections symphonic, concrete,
Like visiting forgotten shrines,
so much depends on Memory.
Glazed frogs transporting -- deja vu --
Faint essences to flush meadowlarks
From the nesting spirit
To wild flights of fancy.
Each a winged message,
Calling,
Answering unasked questions.
My gaze, pilgrim in a landscape
Painting itself inside,
Inviting me to choose the color and the brush.

This is a risky business,
Uninhibited mindblooming,
Thinking
On the odd chance a relevant word
Will leap the illogical impasse

To connect, only connect, with senses
Borges used to express his stories,
Outside the straitjacket
Civilized craftsmen have woven
To demand our logical obedience,
To keep the body from amphibious imitation,
To take the surprise out of our eyes,
To make leaping more a looking than a leap,
To channel stimuli through the consensus,
To cloister scholarship in cells,
To regard products over actions,
To pin frogs down on waxen trays,
Pulled limp from jars of yellow formaldehyde
With corroded cork stoppers,
For juveniles to dissect weekly,
Who then think of frogs splayed and of lost loves
When they catch a whiff of strong perfumes,
And of leeches as curious instruments of hygiene.



[Claude Levi-Strauss on myths said: " People do not tell myths; rather myths tell themselves in people." What we do when we make poems, is what artists like Cezanne did when he painted landscapes. Cezanne is reputed to have said about painting: "The landscape thinks itself in me and I am its consciousness." Likewise, the poet is partially in control: the poem makes itself in the poet and the poem is something by means of which we see ourselves, a process of expressing who we are, or -- in the case of frogs -- who we might be.]


David Gilmour