Reflections in the Water's Eye
A mirror in a mirror in a mirror
I
In the skiff’s wake long slow swells roll, and roll, and roll, twinned ripples metrically splitting and symmetrically spreading until they hit the canal’s bedsides and heave back slopping in synchrony and collide, stitching X after X in sequences of liquid squiggles which crisscross and spring into a diamond interference lace embroidering the water’s skin, a wave lace that wobbles between binary positions, switching places like a lattice of dancers, and warps its reflections into parodies, snaking leaves, smearing vermilion shingles into triskelions, and nightmaring the watery visage of an otherwise debonair mandarin duck. This frisking water, though dusty, belittered, and polluted with a trashcan’s orange image, is consummate master of its artless art, and it swirls its paint of light, swirls and swirls, kinks colors with the easy flair of a virtuoso hitting exactly the right hue on a horn over and over, blowing out its kinetic energy, only slowly rolling into a completed sense of stately unity, seeking rest, seeking rest, seeking rest, till hush: it smooths itself flat, the water’s painting of the sky solidifies, and once more fish nibble under ripples in the clouds.
II
Late summer. An ebullience of gnats. Exhausted water bestrewn with the scarlet debris of a hawthorn party. Far away lout speakers growl and rave, but I sit distanced on the canal, notebook on knees, nostrils drinking herbal air in the sunny shade of a hippie willow under an immense proscenium arch of featherstuffed cumulonimbi. Reverently, almost piously, I hoist my eyes to the azure crown of the lower sky, an obscured superroyal blueness occupied by bedroom kingdoms of clouds, opposing pillow-lords who rear suzerain manes shaded white-gold to greige to granite, gallop-scudding pomply above a splashing profusion of foliage. The breeze comes like a bright beast through the trees, a leaf flies down darting like a little green bird, and swoopy swallows snip air like seamstresses of wind, yet I snub these wonders and crane my cloudbound head higher, up to the highmost skymost, till a heavenly reservoir of blue pours bowls of liquid lapis lazuli into my lovestruck eyes. In my worshipful fancy, even the sacred sun is just a white trumpet fanfaring this tyrant sky, ultramarine emperor of beauty of my heart’s mind; and as his ardent fan I find every alibi to describe his primacy. Yet his crown, I recognize, is one I myself have bestowed. This magical sky, all indigo quirls of gloria mundi, is merely an image rendered in the trompe l’oeil paints of my brain’s eye, on a scale from horizon to dot, in the binocular perspective we call the human. To God, blue wouldn’t even be visible unless She limited herself to animal parameters, and why would She? She would perceive light itself, across all time simultaneously, from all sides and scales and sizes, from vaster than universes to punier than quarks. Perhaps the rippling panorama of reality would look like nested fields of embellished vibrations, humans nothing more than ruling lattices of cells constructed from molecular hierarchies of laughing atoms, in an ascending spiral of emergent worlds all tapestried by stained light, the photons neither particles nor waves but simpler forms whose severe beauty, God’s own favorite sight, will dwell forever outside our parish-pump paradigms. So forget the god’s-eye view: our eyes speak only to other eyes. The sky is our sky.
III
The sky’s half-dressed, skin vivid blue, but the moon spurts up as if from a squeezed fruit, and I swivel my head west just as the sunset’s intinction turns the water into wine—plop!—and blue skids off the sky, shivering into purpling dusk glimmery with soft thoughts, while in the darkling water the sky’s image dies, dwindling into rippling windows, gentle gleams of someone else’s peace, while shadow people rush into deeper shadows, while a sign turns away from me and a four-winged dragon zips in a quadcoptered quiver and on the far bank a few white-red blinkers weave on and off like signals I don’t know how to decode, while an elm bough dances like an argument of branches, defining itself down to its furthest fractals against what few stars the city allows, while my ears are wreathed by leaves, breathy chirrs, wave-slops, passing cars’ ototoxic radio pop, and gentle guitar licks from a hidden fingerpicker whose hesitating chords loop into the sonic bows of a melodic monument in aerial stone of a broken flow’s raw glow, and the canal’s surface grooves like a record that if played would contain the song of her waves. In the dark I can’t read ripples, but this much is noctilucent: that living beauty is only the most poignant emblem of death, and these are the lost-fly compost nights of an aging August, this summer rotting from under me, swelling with humidity like a banana past its prime, its warm wind of decay having blown me outside to sit and ink this carpet page of incipits, to seek to capture and keep this old season, to use it as a launchpad for atmospherics, to sign the night sky, writing legato in light falling from behind… Ah, d’you hear that? It’s the animal at the end of the night: from under the bridge it grinds: a steaming beast awash in sodium glare, churning out iridescent eddies slugged with petroleum mucus, trailing an intense white beam that stabs down like an icicle, a frost Excalibur falling: so go ahead, pull the sword of light from the stone of the water, and become sovereign of the image—but do remember that the image is an image of itself, it is irreducible, both impression and expression, symbol and syllabled; fisheying the whole in a round, it stands for itself and also for everything else.
IV
Ruskin said artists must only show the day undressed. Anent nature we must defer on our knees, self-efface so we don’t deface, stand aside with a subdued flourish and let the rainbow spread itself like a deck of cards—then quick, grid that rainbow, contour-map that trembling treeline, foreground that pale thistle and shade in every sporangium on its anther, staying true to truth, reverencing verisimilitude. Well. Ruskin’s best drawings may make my eyes exult, but I’m not satisfied with what is: yes, give me acid blue sky; but then give me its muted, arted reflection atop the purpling water; add the reflection of that reflection, rippling through the electricity of my consciousness, sky in water in mind, shocking me with delight; and then give me a third reflection, the image of those images bobbing in this dissolving lattice of words; then a fourth ‘flection, in your mind, that mirror which alters what it reflects; thus let us rise through full awareness of all layers till we reach the final stage of awakeness, writer and reader clasped in a locket look with a metallic blanket: inside this hull our embers pearl, for in here there is no other time, only this one thought flowing onward and upward and outward, this captured idea turning and furling and burning in the stream of your consciousness, its wefts transposed, its flows tangling and tangles flowing, its streams flowering and flowers streaming, blooming and fluttering, weaving with the watery to-and-fro motion of new notions, until this metaconceptual lace of superharmonic phenomena, bleeding clear, approaches purest geometry, plaiting into and out of and through itself across all three axes: past, present, and future suspended upon this wavy involution, our twin ripples of mind whirling like dancers who, after completing their separate pirouettes, will merge into each other facefirst.