January 24, 2013

Fog again, the early morning gray should give way to bluer sky, but the sky hangs low and gloomy this morning.  The maple buds grow steadily, now visible easily from the window.  Everything is looking limp and wet. 

 

The birds are quiet, only the mockingbird making song.  A tiny green anole raced up the crepe myrtle's trunk and disappeared, like a stroke of chartreuse lightning but leaving no char behind only a streak of green lingering in the vision.

Today a longer poem because I recognize it, because of the aggie bird at Armand Bayou, that chased the mullets down the length of the murky brown water always entering where the mullet popped out of instead where it was, so it escaped and the bird went on its silly way chasing the dream of mullet always ahead of it. 

Mullet 

The stupid joy of mullet.

All along the Laguna Madre, mullet

fling themselves into the air for the tiniest sliver

of eternity.  Thinking they're flying .  Stupid mullet.

Escaping their watery world by three inches, maybe six.

The weight of their tails pulling them back

even as they ascend,

so they never complete an arc,

never cut loose of those watery bonds.

The soul of mullet escaping gravity

for a millisecond.  And then the dull splash.

Over and over, their short-lived conversions.

All along the Laguna, the plop, plop,

plop of mulled sucked back home.

And again they're at it.  As if throwing themselves headlong

up into the abyss.  Falling short.

And throwing themselves again.  And again the splash.

Their hope and my despair.

The pure illogic of mullet. 

A plover flying watches this.  Then skims the surface,

three inches above the water, beak open in

  expectation.

It owns the air.  It is the anti-mullet.

A grebe calling, cackling, hooting.

A gull drops headlong

into the water, breaking its glassy plane

on this still day.

Redwing blackbirds, slightly heavier

than a breeze, ride cattails down to the bog.

On shore the cattails are beaten down

  where alligators bed.

Water, sand, air dissolving into each other

at this convergence of the physical universe.

A place of shifting gravities.  And again, plop,

the mullet.

Geoff Rips 

There's something satisfying about both the "stupid joy" of the mullet and the dogged determination of the bird that was chasing it.  That the mullet just had to see what was beyond its watery world and that the bird just knew sometime it was going to actually catch one and satisfy its hunger for that silver flesh.  And me, I can root for both of them impartially, wishing there were some way for both to have what they want.  Sometimes I think I am like that mullet, just trying to see what is beyond the daily world, and sometimes like that bird where what I am chasing, the wisdom or the knowledge is always just beyond me.  And there is always the natural world, open for observation, for entering in, for learning, and most days, that's enough for me.