Places Water Seeks

Lake Light, September Morning- painting by Kevin Macneil Brown,
watercolor on paper, 2010
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Places Water Seeks

I

River and sky exchange
Intersticial gleamings and
striations of low-toned
light in September:

gray
to steel to
silver to
bronze



II

I am walking in the
shallows and
stalking a heron;
the heron is
stalking the shallows,
watching the water;

The morning is mostly bedraggled
but also
burnished



III

It’s like this at the places where water seeks
the level of flowing, fulfilling--

Such that EVERYTHING
else becomes the guide to its own

horizon


At the Dog River, it’s the
smoke-blue of White Rock Mountain
quiet and looming beyond the bend

At Lake Champlain, it’s those
strong, jagged ranges ringed hard all around


At Good Harbor, the Atlantic at Cape Ann,
it’s Dogtown’s high granite, yes--
but also the lucent gleamings,
twinned and soft-hazed, of
The towers of the Church of
Our Lady of Good
Voyage.

I am so often looking
up and over, into and
beyond the limit…

It is, after all,
water itself
that rises

To push at, then hold.
the entire sky
and more.


- Kevin Macneil Brown

Seeking Shadows, Holding Light: Music for the Fall Equinox

Sept. 23, 2010

I step outside with coffee mug in hand at 5:32. Clouds riding low on morning horizon, but stars and Jupiter in clear sky above, and a bright satellite moving across from NW to SE. Cricket song hazes the warm air. There’s a band of light, rising pale and high, directly across from where the sun will soon appear.
Coffee half gone at 5:50. I go inside, sit down with my steel guitar, and begin to play, tuning my heart and thoughts toward autumn’s arrival. The music rises, its simple and somewhat stark harmonic motion conjuring for me the image of a web of slow, wide ripples—and also, somehow, the ghosts of British Renaissance church music living on in American mountain ballads.
I listen and play while the morning light arrives on the first full day of fall.

-kmb

Morning Shore, September Light

North Shore Passage- Painting by Kevin Macneil Brown,
watercolor and gouache on paper, 2010