The Sunday Son Poem On the Return

Canticle On the Return of the Peepers

It begins just like the squeaking of a wheel
somewhere in the wetlands. Earth is turning
slowly on its rusty axis. Listen to
the innocence behind the worn cliché though—
this is particle collision in its essence.

Ice has melted after being in the shadow
of the earth for much too long. Twice hydrogen
and oxygen alone is giving little carbon-based
amphibians such holy voice and psalms are pouring
from their gentle bodies filling night with April

glories: Sun, they sing, has been here; Sun, they sing,
will be here in the morning; Sun, they sing, the sun!
And here I listen to their song, reflecting on
its meaning, lectio divina, so translating
what I can for you: the mystic coming then

to light again; the once becoming future now;
the always in your heart; the being in your blood;
the everlasting taste; its conscious sound;
this sight; our life;
new found.

~Son Rivers 2008

Another Sunday Son Poem (# 19)

Rock Water Scissors

The consciousness of all
Creation isn’t
metaphysical, some
speculation,

philosophical
conceit or cirrus
cloud reflected in
my sweating glass

of lemonade, but rock
hard mineral
or vegetable
or animated water-

fall descending
in a galaxy of sentient
enlightened
splash.


~Son Rivers 2005

I love the love of love

A Nineteen Line Tetrameter Poem Written For My True Love Beverly AKA That Skye Who Not So Coincidentally Was Born On The Nineteenth Day Of The Same Month As Me, And So A Seventy-Six Beat Poem Like The Seventy-Six Trombones Which Led The Big Parade, And Our Hearts Like Copper Bottom Tympani In Horse Platoons Thundering, Thundering All Along The Way And Loving A Full Octave Higher Than The Score

I love your cells, especially
the ones that dwell within your blood,
the white, the red, the never-ending
wine I taste each time I sip
the love within your lovely lips.
Its sweet bouquet, your DNA,
is similar to mine in oh
so many ways, but in those ways
that differ, oh they differ in
a way I know is different in
a way I’ve known before I knew
myself. I love the fact that you
are love itself—I love the love
we make when making love, I love
the you I love, I love the love
we love, I love the love of love,
and most of all, I love the way
we love to help each other love
to say: “I love I love I love.”

~Son Rivers 11/2006

these four specific walls

Beauty Is In the Eyes

These walls, these four specific walls,
created by a crew of carpenters
encircle everything they swing
their hammer to: joint universe

no worse than highest mountaintop
or island ocean endless view.
Don’t let the mundane limit you.
There’s more to wonder than just 'the seven'—

even the manmade reeks of heaven.

~Son Rivers 2007

reality we think is real

The Tao of Reality

Given that the mind can never
comprehend the essence of
reality, it generates
a virtual reality,

reality we think is real,
reality we designate
reality, reality
that’s actually afraid to death

of actual reality,
that hungers to identify
with any form but genuine
reality in order to

convince itself it’s real. It isn’t.


~Son Rivers
January 2008

licks you with its vast

The Trickster of Plum Island

The waves approach my footsteps like a pup,
Covert but playful, always moving in
With fearless leaps, then just as fast
Reversing that encounter with a spin
Of snout, a wag of tail, and then a jog
Around itself until it rushes past
The undertow, collects another swell
Of confidence, and rides the breaking surf
Again, repeating all in parallel.
But when at last it licks you with its vast
Infinity, you know you're on the turf
Of that coyote, trickster of this beach,
Inviting you to play with mysteries
Beyond the sweeping shorelines of your reach.

~Son Rivers 2002

making matter’s transubstantiation

On Secular Immaterialism

We turn to science as if
the world discovered by
an observation of the things
we dream up in our lives
exist without our making.
We say the gods are dead,
that matter is the one
and only bread of life
and energy the wine
the engines of our world
create in making matter’s
transubstantiation.
Not that science dreams
Newtonian delusions
in quest for truth these days.
The facts are known: the world
is consciousness alone.

~Son Rivers 2006

something undefined

Foggy Metaphysics

We see nothing; we call it fog.
Of course it’s something—we see
the fog. But what we cannot see
we cannot name. And so we call
it fog. Yet behind the fog is something
undefined—indefinite.

If one is careless one will see
what one just wants to see. Or one
will say it’s nothing. But it’s not—
it’s something else. It’s something that
is near, that waits there in the mist
for you to strike it. Then, you’ll see.

Son River 2005

That Leads Me to This One

Metrics of Hawks and Me

Ten hawks pass overhead
in random order, just
a temporary sum,
a magnitude that must
decline if hawks are true
to being hawks. A few

will start to separate
in circles like a cell
dividing from itself
itself, in parallel
geometries of chance,
a reckoned elegance

that leads me to this one
experience of flight.
Much later, on a peak
of granite, I will sight
a single hawk below
and measure vertigo.

~Son Rivers 2004

To Continental Christ

Reel Self

I desired the sea today;
I needed fourteen miles of vision.
Low clouds were pressing pines along
the river with emotional weight.
The ocean didn’t feel a thing.
I felt the mist of lost Atlantis
there and heard a foghorn speak
behind closed doors. Each distant island
was a word, an opening
to continental Christ ascending
from the lobster trap of thoughts
beneath ten thousand years of night.
I saw a boat become a wave
and then its wake become the light.

~Son Rivers 04-May-2008

Dreaming New Year Resolution

Skating on New Year's Eve

They're skating on this firm unwavering pond
inside a cemetery, between lush pines
and fields of gravestones. There's not much beyond
but pale horizon and some faint designs
created by a mist above the sea.
Still nothing in the air dampens their fun.
No worries freeze their blur of activity;
nothing required is setting with the sun.
Instead, maintaining balance on a small
knife's edge, they need make no new resolutions
except this one: not fearing their own fall.
So some are sketching circles in the ice,
figure eights, or other revolutions.
Others draw their straight lines once or twice.

~Son Rivers 2003

First There Is An Island Then There Is

No Island

As the tide decreases in Bar Harbor
twice a day, Bar Island, situated
opposite the town, across the harbor,
soon becomes no island, and the water
in-between the island and the village
soon becomes a narrow kind of isthmus
there instead, connecting town and headland.
Cars begin to cross the drying sandbar.
People walk their dogs along new shorelines.
Seagulls search for shellfish in the shallows.
Some nights, like tonight, the sun will lower
as the tide grows back into its fullness,
and the land transforms back into island
as the day returns into the darkness.

~Son Rivers 2002

Say the Truth

One Thing

If I have to say one thing
I guess I have to say the truth,
but then again the truth is something
you can’t say. But poetry
is something said that cannot be

so said. So let me say this truth
that can’t be said in poetry
and so be said. The truth is this:
yes, nothing in the world is true.
The grass is green; the sky is blue.

~Son Rivers 15-Jun-2008

That, In Fact, In Truth, I Am

The Womb of Livelihood

I am an embryo
in uterus, secure

within four walls of books,
ten thousand objects, and

a few select divine
relationships with other

lovely embryos
in uterus as well.

I am an ultrasound
of solar winds. I am

a worshipper of worry
wrapped in fetal-like

position praying to
the amniotic fluids

and securities exchange.
I am unborn to that

celestial and quantum
energetic wonder

that, in fact, in truth,
I am, indeed, unborn.

~Son Rivers 04-Jul-08

The Self of Love

Me

You must accept the fact
there are no facts except
that fact, before the truth

begins to dawn on you
that you are not the true
authentic you, but one

who suffers through a life
conducted from a view
untrue. It’s love that’s you.

~Son Rivers 05-Aug-06

World of Waves

Waver

The winds are waves
and the dunes are waves and the sea
is waves. The clouds
are waves in a sky of waves,

and seagulls are wings
of waves in a world of waves.
My blood is a wave

flowing from the wavelength
of my heart; my breath is a wave
passing through
the waveform of my lungs.

And I know my soul
is just a waver
in the mystery of the whole.

~Son Rivers 2005

The Tao of Word

(SSP-4)

The Tao of Duality

Tonight, which is the opposite of day,
I wish to think about duality,
while typing letters which create these words
in Word, a Microsoft word processor.

This personal computer is a perfect
metaphor for that, now come to think
about it. Everything within its world
becomes a binary determination.

Mind is that as well. Except its speed
exceeds ten thousand Buddhas times a Mega
Hertz that’s measured in a God knows what.
In other words, it’s really wicked fast.

But still, despite the engine underneath
the hood, the neighborhood is black and white.
There’s not a thought that’s not a mathematical
equation from a string of ones and zeroes.

But reality is not that way.

29-Dec-2007

Loony Sutra

(SSP-3)

Eh, What Am I Doc?

Perfection is a diamond
in our carbon-based
reality. Perfection

hurts and there’s no crying
in perfection, Joe.
Perfection is a carrot

Bugs Bunny never wanted.
Elmer Fudd desires
that silly rabbit though.

13-Jul-2006

Never Mind (SSP-2)

The Summer Breeze Will

Each leave is like a thought
and every single branch
is action like an arm
that moves a cursive hand
drawing the pen across
an empty space of paper.

Some mistake it all
as something they have willed,
an animate display
of mind. But never mind.
We know there is a wind
that blows across the wood—

and makes the world just happen.

11-Jun-08

Sunday Son Rivers Poem

Loving Samsara

Tonight I call to Walt
invoking all that poet’s
spirit toward my own
as he already has
entreated mine. I stop
tonight to bless this dream,
illusion of creation,
unbelievably
variable, instilled
with photosynthesis
and playful respiration.
Breathe the present moment,
greenery and steel,
aware with every conscious
gulp that it’s not real.

23-May-08