(11) Haibun: The River
The River
There is a trick I discovered as a kid. I had a collection of those “magic eye” books, where, if you relax your vision enough, (“try to see through the page”, I remembered one of the instructions saying) you can make a shape coalesce out of a seemingly random pattern of day-glow squiggles: a mickey mouse head, a boat, a horse. I appropriated this technique and judiciously applied it to things beyond the pages of the book, hoping to see the invisible. I must have appeared such a wistful kid, looking into patterned wallpaper, a lawn full of daisies, the grain of a wooden table. Most things contained nothing beyond themselves, but sometimes I’d get lucky and the leaves of a bush would telescope into layers of infinite depth, or the ceiling tiles would reveal themselves to be an ocean. Then I discovered I could be mobile in my experiments. On a sufficiently long footpath, I could set my eyes on the horizon and reverse the whole enterprise of walking. Now I was still, though I walked, and the vista moved past me. I could turn the globe like a wheel beneath my feet as I remained balanced at the apex, as though I was part of some miniature clockwork panorama. These experiments culminated in the revelation of rivers. By positioning a river so that it occupied nearly the totality of my view, and with that same fundamental softening of the gaze, I could freeze a river mid-flow and set myself and the bank on which I stood rushing sideways upstream. Next to a fast flowing river I could catapult myself at dizzying speeds without so much as disturbing the air (I theorised that, with sufficient dexterity, I could also freeze a train as it stampeded past the platform, and that the resulting sideways rush could well be intolerable for humans. But having never ridden in anything but a car, I could neither confirm nor deny.)
There! We shout over
the roar when we find the calf
drowned a k downstream