Walk to the river

Text:

I walk to the river nearly every day. From my house, past Central Middle School, down an alley and through South Park. Then there’s about four blocks of downtown Mass Street. If I simply walk this route, it takes about half an hour to reach the Kaw River bridge. Then I cross, pausing for a moment, over and near the river, and then I head back home the way I came.

But there is more to it than that. I try to walk with my eyes open. I listen. I think about what I am experiencing and what it means. Not always. Often it’s simply one foot in front of the other and who knows where my mind has gone off to. And sometimes something more happens within the intersection of where my actual body is walking in space and time and also where my mind is. Sometimes within the space of a half step – more happens in that moment of meeting than during the other roughly 3 miles of my normal walk.

I walk roughly the same path but of course the light and the weather changes. Plants go through their cycles. People are not so much a blur as they are something like an approaching flash of headlights in my eyes. And then they’re gone. But not all of them. Some images remain. And some people settle into a place in my mind over time.

Consider the other elements too. I start to place some of them the way have tucked the blue glass tiles on the Ranjbar building or the Roosevelt Fountain in South Park into cubbyholes in my head. And some of the things that I have often walked past - failing to hardly notice them a hundred times or more - suddenly they almost magically appear.

It’s only a relatively short walk. There are pauses, detours. It’s an easy walk, easily distracting.

What is it that I hope will happen? It is usually enough to get some exercise, some fresh air, to see and hear the world. I feel the place. I feel the people. I feel myself, alive, marking one foot in front of the other.

And sometimes it’s as if all of time and space glance through me, although surely it’s only small portions of each, but still more - considerably more - than I might have anticipated. Rarely does this moment extend very long for very far, but sometimes it lingers.

Over the days and months it’s as if I have walked through immaterial mists. Memories, some might say. I have some few simple words which I try to write down based upon my walking. Language is a way to try to keep in a pocket of our consciousness portions of what we have lived - what has mattered to us.

Here’s a poem – I sometimes prefer to call them word sketches – that says once again part of what I have just said here.

Some time when I walk

            across the Kaw River Bridge

The sky is reflected in the river.

Some time it is only the sky

            reflected in the river.

Words and poetry do not fail me

They are simply not enough

They neither start

            what I have to say

Nor do they finish.

They are a snag

            to hold on to

                        for a moment

                                    for my mind to catch

                                                a breath

            as the river draws

                        my body ever down

                                    stream.