Hamlen Brook by Richard Wilbur

Hamlen Brook
by Richard Wilbur

At the alder-darkened brink
Where the stream slows to a lucid jet
I lean to the water, dinting its top with sweat,
And see, before I can drink,

A startled inchling trout
Of spotted near-transparency,
Trawling a shadow solider than he.
He swerves now, darting out

To where, in a flicked slew
Of sparks and glittering silt, he weaves
Through stream-bed rocks, disturbing foundered leaves,
And butts then out of view

Beneath a sliding glass
Crazed by the skimming of a brace
Of burnished dragon-flies across its face,
In which deep cloudlets pass

And a white precipice
Of mirrored birch-trees plunges down
Toward where the azures of the zenith drown.
How shall I drink all this?

Joy’s trick is to supply
Dry lips with what can cool and slake,
Leaving them dumbstruck also with an ache
Nothing can satisfy.

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This one offered by the same friend as the last, and I love the immersion into nature, the immediacy of place of the brook that you can almost feel the dappled shadows of, and the last lines that speak to the cutting edge of joy into this experience of being human, that it slakes and aches at the same time, both/and, the mirroring just as the water mirrors, and the fundamental question of incarnation, “How shall I drink all this?”

Hamlen Brook is from Richard Wilbur's New and Collected Poems (Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1988), the volume that won him his second Pulitzer Prize in 1989. Hamlen Brook is a small stream in western Massachusetts, near where Wilbur lived for many years, and the poem is one of a small cluster of his late meditations on water, attention, and the mind's response to visible order.