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Marc Zegans is a poet and creative development advisor. His previous collections of poems include, The Underwater Typewriter, and Pillow Talk. Taconic is from Marc Zegans’s newest collection, Boys in the Woods, a limited handmade edition from Crane Maiden Books. It can be purchased at:  http://www.pegsimone.com/store/p3/Boys_In_The_Woods_by_Marc_Zegans.html

Marc Zegans

TACONIC

when you dive under the Bash Bish cascade

there’s a shelf to the left behind the fall.

you slither up the slippery rock, and sit

the water pouring two feet from your face.

first you smell the iron, then feel the cool

of granite and mountain watershed

looking intently at, through and across

the image distorting gouts, drops and flows

that when colder would be thick icicles

but now dance and stream, yet constant somehow

bounded in the scope, if not the range

of their mutability, well-behaved

at a distance, locally chaotic

and perhaps that’s where the interest lies.

yet they are a thing and an image too

extant and observable in themselves

if we choose to look at what is placed

directly before us, but we baffle ourselves

when we do other than relax our gaze

because those endless drops defeat our choice

drawing us to and through, to and through

until we lose all our preconceptions

of what we are observing, and notice

that our skins are cold against the granite

and that there are things to see in the space

behind the falls, darker, greener, un-sunned

and we notice again that we are cold

alone in a place swimmers do not go.

I first sat on this shelf at eight years old

and learned the trick of diving off, kicking

straight down, letting the spill drive toward bottom

the lower current then popping me corklike

to surface, at the rim of the basin

carved by the falls over thousands of years.

there was something magic about the ride

under Bash Bish, a synchronous blending

of body, and water’s natural engine

that kept me returning for forty years

to the perch, and the plunge, and the rise

into daylight, river pounding behind.

— Marc Zegans

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