By the Bois Brule
What better way to wile away a late-September Sunday afternoon
Than by taking an eight-mile drive, from Lake Nebagamon,
East, on County B (the Coolidge Memorial Highway),
To the canoe landing at Winneboujou, on the susurrant Bois Brule River,
Just to sit on its pine-lined, sun-whispered banks
And witness its crystalline molecules flow swiftly north,
With riffling determination, toward voracious Lake Superior?
Better yet, how could anyone get closer to the cosmos
Than by following the languorous progress of a northern leopard frog
Sunning on a log straddling land and water,
And by focusing on its closed bug-eyes, its slowly lifting and falling sides,
Translating its skin designs, from their original scrolls,
Back into the scared scriptures of nature's mother tongue,
And, in the process, coming to sense how it feels to be immortal?
Too soon, time and I coincide with the future,
Which awaits my evolving intuitions, my prophecies as to who I'll be.
I drive County B, in a winding, widening silence
That beckons me back to the locus mundi of my cabin,
Where, if the knowing spirit chooses, I'll continue my inward journey
To the origin of river molecules, frogs, trees, human beings
And resolve the mystery of how air breathes eternity into each of us.
09/25/11 - (4)
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