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Prologue Swimming Chenango Lake Winter will bar the swimmer soon. He reads the water’s autumnal hesitations A wealth of ways: it is jarred, It is astir already despite its steadiness, Where the first leaves at the first Tremor of the morning air have dropped Anticipating him, launching their imprints Outwards in eccentric, overlapping circles. There is a geometry of water, for this Squares off the clouds’ redundances And sets them floating in a nether atmosphere All angles and elongations: every tree Appears a cypress as it stretches there And every bush that shows the season, A shaft of fire. It is a geometry and not A fantasia of distorting forms, but each Liquid variation answerable to the theme It makes away from, plays before: It is a consistency, the grain of the pulsating flow. But he has looked long enough, and now Body must recall the eye to its dependence As he scissors the waterscape apart And sways it to tatters. Its coldness Holding him to itself, he grants the grasp, For to swim is also to take hold On water’s meaning, to move in its embrace And to be, between grasp and grasping, free. He reaches in-and-through to that space The body is heir to, making a where In water, a possession to be relinquished Willingly at each stroke. The image he has torn 3 prologue
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Flows-to behind him, healing itself, Lifting and lengthening, splayed like the feathers Down an immense wing whose darkening spread Shadows his solitariness: alone, he is unnamed By this baptism, where only Chenango bears a name In a lost language he begins to construe – A speech of densities and derisions, of halfReplies to the questions his body must frame Frogwise across the all but penetrable element. Human, he fronts it and, human, he draws back From the interior cold, the mercilessness That yet shows a kind of mercy sustaining him. The last sun of the year is drying his skin Above a surface a mere mosaic of tiny shatterings, Where a wind is unscaping all images in the flowing obsidian The going-elsewhere of ripples incessantly shaping. from The Way of a World (1969) 4 prologue

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Flows-to behind him, healing itself, Lifting and lengthening, splayed like the feathers Down an immense wing whose darkening spread Shadows his solitariness: alone, he is unnamed By this baptism, where only Chenango bears a name In a lost language he begins to construe – A speech of densities and derisions, of halfReplies to the questions his body must frame Frogwise across the all but penetrable element. Human, he fronts it and, human, he draws back From the interior cold, the mercilessness That yet shows a kind of mercy sustaining him. The last sun of the year is drying his skin Above a surface a mere mosaic of tiny shatterings, Where a wind is unscaping all images in the flowing obsidian The going-elsewhere of ripples incessantly shaping.

from The Way of a World (1969)

4 prologue

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