Sunderland Capture

The swallowtail butterfly, over black moving marble -
Of the pool, swooped down so you could hear the flick
Of his wings on the water, bright dipsomaniac,
Sunborn and yellow and thirsty as the sun.
With the sound of a secret kiss he plunged again,
And yet again, and lay with bright wings flat
In sweet and golden exhaustion, floating with the stream,
Then, revived, rose up anew into his world
Of air and danger and light. He vanished between
The trunks of trees that were there before I saw him,
And will be after both of us have gone,
Inconstant, whether man or butterfly.
But his mad drinking made me thirst for the river—
Dark, known, undeciphered, however known—
More even than is my wont. Gone the desire
To take the trout, whose circle gave the pool
Hidden purpose. I was getting with the butterfly
Where I desired to be, by being there.
Tomorrow, I thought, I will fish the Sunderland.
The Sunderland’s unobtrusive, a strip of stream
You would hardly look at from a Pullman window.
But you never will, thank God! The Sunderland
Can be looked at only, so to say, from within
Its enigmatic alternation of pools
And rapids in their haste, ‘mid oak and cat-briar,
Green, flexible, and harsh, laurel like combers
Hanging ere they break, later azalea dropping
Like a veil that hides the secret gods withdrawn,
That dwell in the dark of the mind, known but not named.
Also there is mud enough, false tongues of swamp,
Where you thought it was all hard gravel or solid sand.
You rouse black duck and partridge, and in the windfalls
There is always a dry rustle mocking the liquid
Perpetual music of little cataracts.
It was hot when I got to the stream. And my mind was hot,
As minds too often are, when small, unsolved
But desperate quandaries run like frightened beasts
In narrowing circles. Minds are a lot alike
Though we invest the notable ones with powers
And noble exceptions. We think of Einstein as calm,
Happy, equal to his problem. No doubt he is,
If you limit the problem. But the whole Einstein has
Relatively as hard a time with his whole problem
As you with yours. And it’s probably as banale,
And you wouldn't understand it, if he dared state it, »
Any more than you can understand your own,
Which you never could. Nor will you be able to.
My God, it was hot. The jet-winged darningneedles,
With bodies like emerald bars, lanced in the light,
And a film of pollen lay on the still backwaters,
Like desert dust on a dead Arab's eye.
Yet cool breathed from the river as 1 stepped in
And moved downstream, letting my line loop out.
Speech the wise say is always a sort of action.
Action may be a sort of speech. I was speaking
With the rod, because I had no language to utter
The unformed thing that moved in the mind. It was there,
Had been for months. I had had glimpses of it,
Had shrunk from it, partly ignorance partly fear,
Had ignored it over a job, forgotten it
At a cocktail party. But now, drifting downstream,
I answered it with ritual discipline
Of the split bamboo. What is that childish spirit
Dwelling on the surface of things, that heals the inner
By mere equipping and accouterment,
Putting on the appropriate armor, wearing the costume
Of the part, however one may laugh at the part?
There’s a strange help in being point device
For a little problem that is pointless enough,
No more than a striking trout by the fallen elm.
Why should that bulk so large in the brighter courts
Of a mind that knows gross darkness that can be felt?
I cannot answer, save that mechanical
Rhythm of casting has a healing in it,
Or had for me then, as the line undulated
Over a swirl well known. They were striking short,
A roiling flash, a stroke that bent the tip,
And something lost, as the image of a dream
Is lost in the bright morning. Lost or not,
I hardly cared, because the water and shadow
Were taking possession. The layer of feeling I moved in
Extended itself into a lonely world,
Of which I was in my way the lonely maker,
Who found his work good. Violets and herb-robert
Were doubtless there before I came downstream.
But whence came the proprietary creative
Sense of them, that was more and less than thought,
In spite of the invincible I was escaping,
Fleeing from, if you like? One must retreat
When one is ambushed by the undefined.
Later we may define it. So hope flatters.
But mere possessive darkness of the pools
Was drawing me away from hope and fear,
As if they mattered. And what if one drew blank
Even here in little? One draws blank in the large,
And may ignore it, if one will but learn
This art of drifting, drifting—disembodied,
Or better liberated from the tyrannic
Repetition of the unwisdom of the mind.
There is a long reach on the Sunderland,
One of those places where, when you come there first,
Two things are mixed in your thoughts. It has a strangeness
It never has lost for me. And yet I had known it
Always, before I knew it, as if innate.
It is shaped as a mind would shape a river, if
A mind shaped rivers. Between phalanxes
Of the red willow the stream is the clear thought
Of water, but beneath the maple glooms
At the end of the stretch it has turned deep and gray
s a phoebe’s crest, yet has the mineral gleam
Of the darker striping in onyx. I lashed the fly
In under the overhang with a listless flick,
The gesture of one who says: Shoot and be damned!
For the gust of the art was failing, and I was tired
` Of the heat, the glare, the silence.
Nevertheless the cast was good. It went
Bullet-like to the swirling target. The eddy took
The fly deep down in its stone-colored bosom
Under the maple bough. How should I have known
The attending fury that split time in two
When it hit the hackle, how all life and fire
Would come in color and calamity
To a world redressed by drive and anger, refusal
Of any defeat? Or know that minim resistance
Was akin to the nebula’s that hurls away
From the pull of a train of stars?

In the woods that evening
The flag-flowers stood. Their purple from the dusk
Borrowed a darker glory than day lends them.
Shadow made color substance that the mind,
Hovering, dipped down to and drank like the be e butterfly,
While in the swirl and eddy under thought
Wildness swam gleaming.