Flux of Conversation

Yet again through this house like a mountain stream
      chatter has run down the pine-framed vistas
            each landing’s distinctive prospect of Tahoe
pressed flat by early August heat
      to the conversation pool
            at last almost drained of guests.
All afternoon like a young girl in a creek
      enchanted by its babbling
            and, in order for the current to flow freely
            with a word here, a word there
to this person or that, arranging stones
      adjusting little logs to make eddies
            so you’ve played with us.

You like these metaphors, don’t you, that sink us into nature.
      “We’re sun worshipers,” you used to say.
            But also: “If only the gospel excited me like the Beatles excite me
I might really do something.” This to us as if
      as if poverty qualified confessors
            as if guilt fashioned the perfect wife
perfect hostess comparing notes on old friends, kids, and yes,
      grandkids
            running smooth or wild.
And so today: “But for me now it’s just a matter of getting
      the inside to correspond with the outside.”
            Confess—confess that you’re still stuck here
in this beautiful house, never locked,
      shaped not for envious show but rather quite unknowingly
            to shape you, nature contra nature, mind eroding mind
as if matter could teach morals.
      Life of flowing water, reconciling energies
            dissolving obstacles, architecture murmuring to itself
in banks
      dams
            cascades
                  shaping
                        and shaped
releasing, restraining, to avoid needless destruction
      but the morality, the intelligence, of a stream, not of a
            canal
            or a
            cattle
            chute
much less the cultured discipline of fields
and rigid tree plantations, forcing life
into a fearful frozen symmetry
and regularity of rhythms, framed
in lineaments of compromised desire
that desperately strains against the cage:
      “As for living, our children will do that for us.”
            Or are those rhythms really
                  trance-inducing drumbeats
                        thrusts of love?

So the flood falls, rolling toward Tahoe, big water calling
      boiling vapors breathing toward the sun
            thundertalk rising over Rubicon Peak.
Don’t tell me you can’t hear it—the ill-mannered jeremiads:
      How many innocents saved from inquisition?
            How many false friends lost?
How many times excommunicated for conscience’ sake?
      How many times crucified for another’s sins?
            Yes, the cycle is beginning again, deathly sublimation
cumulonimbus billowing as if
      from a thousand burning houses.
            and you have to say something.
And these houseless naked locals, what shall they do?
      Dig deep, ground squirrels, slant upslope marmots
            your wretched tunnels, downpour coming—
time to go before cloudburst hail and washed-out roads cut us off too.
      We’ll talk again, compare our answers maybe
            after the walls fall down, the air clears, and all spills happily on
sinking toward desolation, watering alkali flats
      the rejected places—and the boulder-rolling pelt-penetrating
            ungovernable torrent destined never to reach the sea
has washed away the good as well as evil