It's called "Song of Emergency."
Comes from a dream.
It's too late and I'm not going to try and repeat
the whole dream now but a dream involved
a beginning in something which turned out later to be mud.
And it began in a very totally timeless state
where the only sense active in me was a sense of touch I feel.
And in the course of the dream is moving around in the mud
and moved up closer to the water.
And found that not the closer to the water I moved,
but that the more I moved in a certain direction,
the more I had to alter the way in which I moved
my body in order to propel myself
from a kind of crawling slithering thing.
At first, into swimming motions once
the mud got thin enough to be water.
And dream included the ecstatic experience of first perceiving
light not objects but just light as in the thin mud light
could penetrate.
And then of coming up into the regular water
and seeing objects, actually seeing things fish, turtles,
leaves and grass in the water reflecting
on the top of the pond.
And then at the end of the dream,
an experience which was of mistaking
a pair of heron's legs for two stalks of grass
and feeding from them.
Else, I don't know what maybe a frog, maybe a fish,
it never came.
It was never clear important in the poem, in the dream.
But then, all of a sudden becoming having to look up
and looking up and seeing a cloud,
and in the middle of the cloud of tiny sun.
And then of becoming more and more aware of something
ominous about this and watching it
and then realizing that the cloud was getting bigger,
the sun was getting brighter.
And only at the last instant realizing
that it was a heron with its head cocked,
it had been looking at me.
And it was a body that was the cloud,
and it was his eye which was the sun and that he had me.
It was too late.
And he pierced me with his beak and it was most
excruciating sensation that I've ever experienced alive or dead,
awake or sleeping, whatever.
It was absolutely annihilating feeling and at the same time
at the very instant that feeling occurred it was finished.
And when it was finished, it was like a totally different kind
of feeling.
And the best way I can think of to describe to you what
the feeling was, it was as if until that moment
of that feeling occurred, I had been like a balloon full of air
and had always thought that what was real about me was
the balloon, was the skin part.
And that when it was punctured the terrible pain
was the recognition that was not the real part of me
at all but the disposable part.
And that suddenly the air which was free and could
go everywhere and mix with itself everywhere,
was what turned out really to be me after all.
But it was like going through a door of some kind.
It was amazing.
It was a very happy feeling by the way thoroughly, thoroughly
happy.
"Song of Emergency."
"After dreaming the pure pleasure
of a being loose and clear water,
diving easily in and out of the warm mud
and deep at the bottom, I wake to the risks of light.
I kick free and I streak joyous as a bird toward the sun,
out of the earth through water into the air,
where I hang for an instant free of awareness of safety, free
of danger in the dominion of the heron.
From this height I glimpse at a distance, tall and white,
the still gods where they bend above the pond
or hunch in trees to dry those wings,
spread glowing in the sun.
They stare into the shallows, they shine like clouds.
At night, I have slept dreaming of those red legged gods whose
eyes are small suns.
Who are silent but whose rare calls
pierce my world like claws.
Who fly as we dream of flying and burn against the sun
in the great tumult of wings.
Whose slow grace threatens us and woos us with its beauty.
Who consume us to survive, whose lives we dread and envy.
Now, I wait the moment when suspended
above the mid world of water, I too
will know the presence of the white cloud,
lowering the explosive sun quick above the pierce of the beak,
the shriek of wings."