Flows

I've Known Rivers
I lived by a brook and the flowing of that brook stayed jollily in my heartbeat.
I lived by a canal once and that flow was barely perceptible though it was there and you thought you could feel it really really late at night.
I lived by the Mississippi River and it was a massive flow, an overwhelming flow, and when you would walk out on the leeve really really late at night, its flow looked like the body of a huge dead leathered beast floating by you, spinning the earth under you, like you supposed the River Styx would look one day as you boarded Charon's little pirogue* down on his blackened bayou.
I have stalled out my MG 1600A on a bridge high over Bayou Nezpique and in the midnight-black dark, a darkness filled with lives, buzzings, wispings, whiffings, far down below the bridge you could smell that blacked out bayou's flow, an ancient odor of prehistoric life that lived within the flow of that bayou, that bayou on that night with the invisible face--its face seen in its smell.
I have lived by a creek, high on a bluff over it a wide creek, a creek whose romantic flow used to shine glittery silvery in the full-mooned high sky nights and crackle like a sparkler in the nights when there were only a billion stars to shine on it.
I have lived by the Atlantic Ocean, in a little house, with the sand of the beach coming right up to its backdoor and the flowing in and out of that massive bowl of water sloshing all night, rocking you to sleep following the flowing of the emotions of the moon.
I have lived high on the pinnacle of a peak above the Pacific Ocean, and the deep flowing mother humming of that massive rocking blue beast roared in the depths of those shivery nights, bold crashings gradually being soothed into watery chorale accompanying the maddening solos of the many feasting gulls as they whirled high against the updrafts of that mighty ocean's flow.
I have lived on a creek that tumbled through a rock dam to slosh its wet dance through a swimming pool contraption the eccentric builder of the little stone house through which the creek splashed and dashed designed himself and which was like a manmade whirlpool and when you sat in that stream's cold waters their flow went all through your body, all up and down your blood stream.
I have lived in a garret apartment and just outside one of those windows a window at which I sat trying to write novels was a gutter spout, and always in the afternoon it rained, every afternoon at 4 pm, like clockwork, rain, and that rain would flush with gusto out that gutter spout, to gush out and then to fall straight-down Niagara-like singing onto the stones of the courtyard five floors below; and every afternoon at 4, I would rush to start writing according to the metronomic beats of that rainwater's flow as I turned that flow of water into a flowing of words, on a certain novel that would eventually be drowned in a long flow of time.

Aging is like living by a river, a river that once flowed with satisfied contentment, like a slow sand dancer as it flowed along gradually over time; however, after storms and then into calms, it picked up tempo and resembled more the spinning dancing that ends Le sacre du printemps. A spinning dancing that is seeming to dervishly spin one's self to death on the dancefloor of time. Today, that spinning, that dancing, that flowing crescendo is flowing through my rhythm-ings (see Thelonious Monk's "Rhythm-ing" for an example), another kind of dance, a dance of hours spinning into years, years with ears, years who hear how many more years I will continue flowing like the many waters by which I've lived--is a life contented by the flowing of those waters? Otherwise, why I'm I so contented at this age in life?

By coincidence, I found this set of lyrics on

MIND IS A RIVER
(Dean Bowman/Daniel Sadownick)

When I sought truth
Religion seemed too choreographed
Though still in my youth
I questioned my own existence
No moral guidance cleansed
My yearning to know about the outside
Chased my tomorrows away
I couldn’t be too long for sure

Because sometimes you can know
Too much for your own bit of good
And following the wrong path
To your dreams and down on your knees

My mind is a river, let flow
Let it flow

Truth captured my soul and
Never back did I have to look
You came into my life and soon
Became like my favorite book
And I read it, oh, always needed
To be made in the person of you
So true and now the joy in my life
Is your love

Because sometimes you can know
Too much for your own bit of good
And following the wrong path
To your dreams and down on your knees

My mind is a river, let flow

© 2005 Blak Berry Jams (SESAC); Nasdan Music (SESAC)

These lyrics come from this interesting site:

http://screamingheadlesstorsos.com/Website/lyrics.html

My all of you respect your age, rejoice in it, and realize there are still some dreams within it that may still become reality if you just keep on livin' naturally in chorus with "the eater of all things lovely--time."

thegrowlingwolf
for The Daily Growler

*In case you need a pirogue, here ya go:

http://www.unclejohns.com/boat/

On August 24th, 79 AD, the city of Pompeii was destroyed by a massive eruption of Mount Vesuvius.

http://www.victorianweb.org/art/crisis/crisis1d.html

The Daily Growler trumpets a Happy Birthday to a certain person. From the ashes of Pompeii's fatal date came millions of lives.