Deep Trout Trilogy

Deep Trout
by Abbott Meader and Walter Easton

Deep Trout, the film: 16mm, 43.5 minutes, color, sound, 1982

The DEEP TROUT TRILOGY is available through www.filmsbyhuey.com

 

Deep Trout, the book: The Bombadil Press, Fairhope, Alabama
125 copies set by hand by Ian Robertson, August 1982

If the fool would persist in his folly
he would become wise.



To create a little flower
is the labour of ages.


Dip him in the river who loves water.


This river we dream
forever whole
Watershed bloodline
Out of the rock and plush
highlands north
Where the air hangs up
the weather settles
And the Earth speaks in tongues
Passing molecular bits
of atomic gossip
Among rootlets quenched and thriving
We dream this whole river
Here at the surface in the light
We splash through the first movement
Glittering a quick jig and fling
Taken at once agreeing
With gravity's inclination
to be revealed in water
We dream forever this river
Its voice full unbounded
at the spring head
Immediate vast harmonies carol
The respiratory songs of glaciers
deserts the least germ
And the the hallowed dissolve of dinosaurs
We dream this river whole
Cedar swamp and peat bog attending
Gorge carving cataract gathering
incessently heaving
Winter ice caught in the tilt of Spring
Summer slaked in the chill of Autumn's
full circles returning.



What is now proved was once imagin'd.


Was it Vishnu, or just his name,
that sprang full-grown,
From the side of the Sacred Mother,
a white elephant?
Was his living only, ever catching up
a fate precipitated from his name?
I consider such questions ~
they revolve in my mind.
I write them on beaten clay tablets
and fling them to the ground.
Over these questions (and a few others)
I am fallen into madness:
Tottering, tumbling, swinging to and fro,
eyes opened, mouth gaping wide ...
The sounds of my own name gush out,
Pouring and flowing about me like water,
I am tossed up ... to lie sprawling on the ground,
mired in a wallow of otic vanity ...
Exhausted, at the far shores of myself,
under strange stars
With neither map nor compass.


No bird soars too high,
if he soars with his own wings.