A Dialogue

There is a river of large volume, whose rushing currents
Wash the dry banks and push their swollen silt
Into a sea that granulates these forces
And drives them back again shoreward.
I was sitting by the bank, on the hump
Of a rough stone, apt with moss, bending
My eyes to the point where horizon
Meets the circuit of the ocean, trailing
Ligate swirls and zags of ruby sand
Into the amethyst and diamond gold
Of a surf stirred by the pattering sun,
While a sonorous breeze, heavy with the fruit
Of tides, the sand-swell, the lamprey's gait,
Strode into the recesses of my mouth
And freshened my tongue, when I noticed
A pale wanderer, a scrap of dusty rags,
A deflated knob of sagging skin,
Struggling up the dunes ragged with sea-weed
And torn by a lucence of shells.

Who was the man? His nose
Thrust out ahead of him,
As if a hook, jagged with the brittle
Barbs of time, had been cast
From that convexity of cruel brine,
And now extended past
The line of sunken prints that
Fell across his gait as silently
As curvaceous reciprocities
Of rose petals melting through the clarity
Of an amber glass, into the air.

His eyes reflected tessellings of cloud
Smattered like cream puffs in a cup
Of wispy tea for which his head
Served as the ladle and the kettle
Simultaneously, a bitter brew
Of sassafrastic sweet,
The kind that leaves a meat
On the edge of the tasteful tongue,
Between the teeth. His lips
Were all the wretched world, only moist
Where a word could struggle to speak.

***

We speak, I said, with words,
Words are a conduit of information.
Not so, spake the seer:
For how can information carry,
Sag and spread through the aimless air?
Is knowledge like a trickle, does wisdom
Filter from the denser to the merely dense
Container? Instruction is an accident,
A spill? If you drop these vessels
Will they shatter, will the gourd
Smash into fruitless cords,
Water-lorn and empty? Reform
The clay that you shaped
With your tongue, "inform":

Is not informing information? How-so?
My lazy eye, distracted, was attracted
To a bee, a fuzz of golden amber
Gathering the tinctures of the sun
And flinging them,
With languorous limbs
That buzzed and hummed,
Onto its carapace, a ragged drum
For transport.