Gloria del Vecchio The PoetDIALOGUE WITH A RIVER WALKER
there is another river under the Delaware-- a river of secrets that has been hidden since the beginning... the shamans knew of it and the immense revolutionary angels who came before the Indians --they knew it too --for this is the Mystery, itself, that is sought in all religions, in all philosophies. there are always those among us who watch on riverbanks. they know secrets. I met a man who walks the riverbanks. looking straight across the river, the mist seems to be transparent and sometimes the fog piles up on the other side. the sun behind the bridge is casting long shadows of the bridge piers. These shadows radiate out from the bridge and pierce the fog "very few of us know," the Riverwalker said, "that the rising sun appears first under one arch of the bridge and them in following mornings in the progressive openings that cross the river-- a private intimacy of passage like the sun reflecting on top of the thick blanket of fog... "then, the long shadows that pierce this vision become darker and strange. .. "they are the Mysteries that are usually hidden or occasionally barely visible or felt. "it is not as I told you...it's not so much that you see something different every day. It's that these occurrences, although rare...come in an endless number of combinations...so that when they do happen there seems to be no end to what you might see. "the peak condition is under the first arch. several days ago, the full diameter of the sun was visible at a low angle both completely under the arch and on the water, and this is the situation which absolutely lights up the underside of the leaves of trees along all the riverbank. "I only saw this once this year because on the other days just before and just after the event I am describing, there were clouds." and I, myself cried to the river's shadows,--"Oh immense angels, what happened here in the beginning? I think time was different then, if it existed at all." then, the Riverwalker answered, "Within a day or so, the sun will no longer rise under the bridge at all. On our river, there will be no sunrises." "What are you talking about?" I said to him. " Are you speaking of your own death, or my death or the death of each one of us? You are wrong! There will always be sunrises on our river! --for-- "I do not know what that bridge is or why it is there--somehow, I think it connects one day to the next, the night with the day, the unconscious with the conscious; yet the bridge is a manmade thing while the Mystery flows forever under it, moving always to the ocean. ..and under that Mystery , flows another and still another and another-- "is this why you walk the river? is this why I walk the river? is this why any of us walks the river? "St. Augustine asked, 'What, then, is time? if no one asks of me, I know; if I wish to explain to him who asks, I know not.' "but what we don't understand is that there are two kinds of time--and probably more than that... "there is the time of human beings that is measured by clocks and calendars and there is what ancient people called 'The Great Time' or the Mystery--the Secret River--so, "what makes you think that because you cannot one morning capture the light under the stone arches of our limited and structured consciousness, that there will come a time when there will be no sunrise on our river? Have you not seen in a brief chance moment, the glow of dawn through a wild bird's quick and eternal wings?"Gloria Calcina del Vecchio in collaboration with Larry Hale