Your Purple River Speaks

Your Purple River

Your purple river speaks,
not of deserts;
for she has never known deserts.
I see her image in your mind.
I hear you sharing the secret word
which grants you passage
into her secret, sacred heart.

Your river was a nun, not a nymph
in some ancient past.
She washed you and rinsed you;
and set you free to be born to earth
as the child of god.
It was a ritual held in secrecy
and left you forever bound
to the river and her flow.

I can see the tree
under which you sat
and let her pass by,
moment to moment.

The river was not the self-same river,
nor could the moment belong to time
and yet be the one when you were together.
The moments went by as did the river;
but they did not leave you behind. They were with you wherever you did go
The river and the moment, they both did flow,
and yet you are there, as I can see,
sitting at the foot of the pine tree,
perpetually lost and ever in search
of the moment and the river,
often leaning forward in a desperate lurch.

Here, from my sultry, windy desert-plains
I can feel the awful winter settling over
with a sheet of ice and spikes of  snow
on your quiet river as the fire burns in your shuttered hearth.
The river now, is no river, she is frozen time which has forgotten the flow, and you are enveloped by the walls which are looking for the hand of the summer.

When the flame of the forest leaps up
to sear God's heaven here,
I will think of the flowing coolness of your purple river
and will hope and try to send some heat of the  sun to make your ice melt and your river flow.
That is the reason we were born so;
I with fire and you with snow.