Girl Riding Bike \ The Squash Blossoms, The Cicadas, The Hare

Alan:  Sometimes perception, emotion and memory fuse, or rather come into simultaneous focus like the layered realities in M.C. Escher’s “Three Worlds.”

Girl Riding Bike

Charlotte, Maine, July 19, 2012

She swings onto the empty country road

and back out of sight.

A glimpse of summers past.

Passing, I glance right, 

see the gravel drive, scruffy hedges,

her soft lavender blur, blowing hair,

the weathered farmhouse she’s riding towards,

a sense of fields falling off the edge

and sky.

Is she happy in this moment’s aloneness?

That’s my hope.

What is it like to be made of air and warm sunshine?

To be flying over the landscape looking down,

and not be in or of it?

What is it like

not to have the earth element dragging one down 

or the water element pulling one onward

towards darkness?

We have all known this.  Still know it.

I remember for a moment,

then forget again.

Nancy: Not even a beach is permanent, the glacial till of the cliff feeds it, the sea steals it and the storms turn gentle summer slopes into steep winter berms.

The Squash Blossoms, The Cicadas, The Hare

And what are they but impermanence,

a day, a month, a year; if we attend,

we too can feel the slew of the earth in our

spines; our eyes can discriminate the finest

degrees of change; even as we walk about in 

the world our inner ears sense the slow roll

of the horizon.

I went to the beach; what I saw was the way

the moon had marked it, it was a calendar;

if I lay the beach transparent on the point

of dawn and the measure of dark it calibrates

the days and the seasons.

When I came home I carried the beach with me;

I carried it back and offered it to the hares

and the cicadas.  I just opened my hand and sat

down with them and we sat together dissolving

and reforming in the sighs and the ripples.