Fork Falls Island

Fork Falls Island

L. Edgar Otto    15 September, 2013

The secret place , out of the way, in the city. Upstream of the old bridge where the channel splits around an island in the river's center the rapids begin to fall.

Ducks, geese, and cranes know the place, pass by in season unaware what forces of town will banish them, remove the wetland oasis in the concrete desert. Give them a trial to adapt to toxins, cling to the roadside, railways, and rivers ever less pure what was the natural prairie fauna and flora.  A bounty then on these half domesticated breeds as if they no longer fit into the world and are in the way, so do not matter.

The island goes under the flood waters three times under that its life like terrain saturates so reviews its life in a second before its final freeze and its ghost departs the second and vanished final time.  Such a drowning in the burst of light prepares the way, its path and self-vanishing.

The boatman over that river Styx between this sunlit shore and the underworld may stop at the lost and re-discovered island to which all myths think there is only a river round where the snake may bite its own tail with purpose or with a chance swirl of spin, its loop by magic self sustained.

We are our own boatman who juggle the fox, the chicken, and the corn across the other side that with only two of them at a time and reversed some trips bring all home safe that one does not consume the other.  Yet, from his higher view he solves the puzzle and higher still his mindful vision sees two ways to choose which are the passengers.

Some of us live in this higher world of shells much greater than we have dreamed or with shifts of time dance in the world as if we are like the foxes heeding nature or subdued having lost so tell others to lose their tails.  At times but in the chicken's mood back and forth, changing sides just for the sake of moving endless random walking only to return to where we began until the lightning strikes blind creatures with their heads cut off. Then some are just the corn, so long to sprout and dream if then and if no crows consume them.

I have watched the boatman in his work along the river and when in the concrete desert of city streets and star obscuring lamps felt the buildings, echoes in their granite stone of messages lost to the wind or in holding patterns in crystal lattices that seem alive enough to climb, set tendrils in our trellises, scale, root, and crumble our ivy skyward walls.

I have come to what without its measure as magic anymore in the sunlit day so late an awakening, free as if in us all beyond scale and degree, even the lesser creatures sufficient to their short lives and memories time enough outside of time to find what seems a Spirit again.  I know more of the secret, the still half unknown of what we and the world are and can be.

We all rest who reach this unrestrained and justified optimism despite what scaffolding in the emptiness of intelligence or ignorance circumnavigates the held face of the moon far from its dark side.

Thus we ask of walls, shells of our mental universe, with a little more wisdom can pass thru them, even before the imagined beginning or tunnel thru that cave wall that we fancy holds the universe as much as we imagine ours is a limited and isolated realm of mind. I understand better the broken souls, their crust that shifts on mantles, membranes that mold their beating hearts of sparks and stems.

They feel in the way and wary of my all to human shelter that they heal fearing the vague deep source of naked light do deny the inevitable drift or crashing of life's continents and of such a gift of compassion born of love, love the substance there in depth by tragedy itself that there be longing, these lost souls sense but cannot truly believe.

Yet in the here and now as there and then how can they understand without their growing that the unexpected consequence of my dabbling alchemy of esoteric physics is that I see with compassion into their hearts so walk among them, share the water and the wine, net the fish, labor to sift for their gold dust pebbles in a dish.  Let us who hath ears and eyes forgive them for they knew not how much more than their earthly dreams they are and still will be.

These islands at the falling rapids, forks in the river, paths that fade slowly a dying species or half tossed away as nature her acorns and apples so replete for those that ripen as this old world keeps on and the source of light renewed. Or that if failed unto others so failed into themselves those that take or lie to what can be, save the narrow chains and parasites on each a universe yet more, thus self unforgiving.

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A short narrative for Open Link Monday although I considered posting a poem from my early teen years on this 50th anniversary of a significant moment in civil rights struggle I called  "Who Are the Damned in Birmingham"  I may link to that page as it is on the web somewhere...