The Rock and the Pool

THE grief of it is that I cannot reach the rock by day or by night without disturbing life that is so much finer, if less conscious, than my own. Here, beside the path, the partridge takes her Arab bath; the warm red dust is scattered with down, and rounded to the measure of the little beating breast. Here small fungi rise, jewel-bright, above the mould; touch one, never so softly, and the coral curve blackens and is marred, so delicate is the poise of its perfection. Here is a span of slender grass, flowered with the clinging bodies of moths; they spread pearl-white wings barred with brown, beautiful enough to beat about the hurrying knees of Artemis. But here Artemis never came. Those white feet of hers never shook the early rain from the elder. Only the Indian hunter may have found the rock, stooped above the rain-pool on the summit, and looked upon his own wild face, shadowed against his heritage of stars.

For from the base of the rock all growth falls away. The maple reddening with seeds, the wind-haunted birch, even the thickets of sumach and vine and partridge-berry are a little withdrawn from it. Fire shaped it. Cold smoothed it. And Time himself could give no more to this ancient of days than cupped moss in the clefts, a few fans of lichen delicate as gray foam; and in the hollow of the crest, a pool.

In the pool is gathered all the life of the rock. It is as a window whereby the deep blind existence prisoned in this iron mass of primeval matter may somehow win hearing and sight; may see his brother stars afloat upon the roads of space, the bees hurrying to the flowering basswood, or hear the last thrush in the cedar; remembering all the bird-voices of time as no more than a momentary song.

There are pools floored with brown and gray leaves, upon which the water lies as warm and still as air. There are pools rimmed with vervain and the wild rock-rose. And there are pools beneath the coronals of goldenrod, where the bumblebee clings, and the snails adventure themselves on summer evenings, and t he moths go hawking early. But this pool is always clear; gray water on gray stone. It is as if no leaf fell here, no wing stayed here. This eye of the rock gazes unshadowed and unhindered into the very universe.

What answer there to the immemorial patience of the stone? I lay my face to the face of the rock, drink the stored warmth, and let my soul go adrift in the sun and the silence. Storm was here last night; a branch fell from the old pine whose seeds have blown to the rock and withered there for twice a hundred years. Here is a little feather, black and gold. Here, beside my hand, a dead, rain-beaten bee, done with all flowers. ’O earth, my mother and maker, is all well with you?’

Only the silence, an oriole fluting through it, and the sunlight. The hurrying bees shine in it like gold. A little pine, springing on the edge of the thick thicket, lifts his tassels to it, goldentinted. The sky falls for a moment with the voices of birds, blown past upon a breath of wind. Soon, the golden lips of the sun, and the gray lips of the wind, will drink the pool from the hollow, and it will be as if the rock slept again, a blind sleep, in which the fall of a year and the fall of a leaf are one. Only within the transient pool is shadowed the infinite; and eternity within this transient heart.