Fishy Reveries - Prologue

If you were to make little fishes talk, they would talk like whales.
Oliver Goldsmith (1728–74), Anglo-Irish author, poet, playwright. Quoted in: James Boswell, Life of Samuel Johnson, entry for 27 April 1773 (1791), to Johnson.1

All I have ever known is the stream.  
The stream sings to me.
The streamsong is in the blood, is the blood,
the great yearning.
The song of the stream, the song of the birds;
both heterophonies decay sweetly in the distance,
into dissonance, the dissonance of wind,
the polyrhythms of shattering rain in summer shade trees.

The rush of the stream's ecstatic waters,
sometimes underground sometimes falling,
the hungry rush to the goal,
which is outlet into infinite basins
and rising into sea air;
this is a drawing into and an elucidation,
it is becoming, it is being.  
The birds in their tumultuous parliaments understand this by their leavings and migrations, parturition and depart, fleeing cold or rain.


All I have ever known: I am in the stream now.  
The stream speaks to me,
there is discourse and development,
yet also the stream is a falling, tumbling mass.  
It quivers with wakefulness;
the stream is always alert though I may sleep.  
In my sleep I often see birds flying above the surface of my stream.  
They too have red fins and silver scales
and they flash against the iron sky.  
In these sleepings, I often see the birds cackling in their classes and rankings,
I feel somehow these must be discussions of great import though,
as with the stream,
their discourse is not of the common variety,
it invites only the careful ear
sensitive and willing,
its organs open to the polysemous vibrations,
the haunting and the scribbled
sounding too closely to be effectively discriminated.

All I have, ever, is the stream as it is now.  
Hellish is the devotee of the was and the will be.  
Tumbling in the same stream as I,
loathing and reviled,
cast as a devious spurner of the roe,
defiler of shallow pools in sparkling shade,
this follower of the carrion is not to be confused with you;
our confidence is with you.

All: I.  Here we have the equation
incommensurable though it may seem.  
Oscillating to the great heightening,
the great yearning,
we are unoffended by its frightening concreteness.  
We see hope for a condensation of our scattered selves that would heal the spirit;
but condensation implies a shattering,
it is our will that it be so,
we love our fate
aligning will with the stream,
the stream is our will,
we have participated in creating the stream.

In the mundane returning year
 I too will pit my will against the stream
-- loving that it be so.  
As the birds pit wing muscle against the wind
...the planet wind,
there are planets in the wind.  
Black Saturn claims dozens in the windwars;
the headwind sweeps them away,
a-wailing.
I have heard the planet's ways...