Ripples on the surface of water
were silver salmon passing under – different
from the sorts of ripples caused by breezes. Tlingit woman via Gary Snyder
The Nyambaga is alive, some rivers have the legal rights
of personhood, but up river and down motion has stopped.
All I see is a cool, seamless mirror, an opaque reflection
as if a moment or divine gaze, almost proof the sky
is overflowing. No life signs until a Pied Cormorant sweeps
round and splashes down, propelling ripples, flashing
concentric circles with some significance, the sort of
movement that offers instant evidence of life, patterns
of beauty, proof that rivers are flexible, elastic bodies.
The cormorant glares at me then dives for fish. I am left
guessing where the bird will break the surface, no way
of knowing. When will a breakthrough for Alzheimer’s
arrive, or the dimensions of cosmic borders become known.
I am left guessing if ripples from actions over seventy
unambitious years have left disturbance, since everything
connects, Hadean to Jurassic to what work I have done,
more importantly, to everything I have failed to do
and failed to imagine as change accelerates.
Upriver is faintly lined, water wants to revert to order
– blank silence, equilibrium and stillness -or
return home to the raucous surge of oceanic life.
The laws of physics are stringent, Black Holes colliding
cast gravitational waves, ripples in the fabric of space-time,
shipping energy across the universe at the speed of light.
Gary Snyder, ‘Ripples on the Surface’, in No Nature, Pantheon Books, 1992. Actually a quote from a Tlingit woman talking to Snyder at Sitka Sound, Alaska.
‘Conceptions of time and space are necessarily created through material practices which serve to reproduce social life.’ David Harvey, The Condition of Postmodernity. An Enquiry into the Origins of Cultural Change, Blackwell, 1989, p204.
