Like a Landslide

How do we learn to recognize?

My eyes work over the lines of your face and I immediately know I've seen the grooves of it before. Memory must live in the grooves of life.

Grooves of all sorts; ditches and dimples, cracks and corrugations. 

This weekend I drove over the pass of I-90 into eastern Washington. To a little town of Quincy, if you are familiar with the area. There is a canyon filled with the Columbia river winding its way past the town. It was good to behold so much space in a single landscape. I'm always too tucked away into my corner of Seattle. 

In a poem written from the point of view of a mirror, the great and terribly parlous poet Sylvia writes; 

Most of the time I meditate on the opposite wall.

It is pink, with speckles. I have looked at it so long
I think it is a part of my heart. But it flickers.
Faces and darkness separate us over and over.

I find that many people are mirrors. And many people are continually frustrated by opposing forces in their attempts to reach out and touch something. In that frustrated distance, however, exists a reflection. Pitching itself and folding in, our parts reflect a landscape. Always. 

As a teenager I would drive a specific route to high school every morning. Many early mornings would see me putting a fleetwood mac tape into my cassette deck and rolling over the Mollala River bridge to Canby High. Every clear morning would reveal Mt. Hood - a white peak set against the rose-tinted clouds of 7 am. 

It was a sort of liturgy for me. I would clear the little hill and immediately the visage of the mountain would be beside me. And in my head, I would repeat; "I have looked at it so long I think it is a part of my heart. I have looked at it

so long

I think it is a part of my heart."

Until it was. It is. 

Whose visage are you seeking, my friend?

Of whom is the reflection in your heart?