Looking for the Soul of the Kaw

I stood on the bridge,

stopping the people as they crossed over.

What do you see? I asked.

The river.

Sky.

Water.

A sandbar.

The levee.

Trees.

Gulls.

Light.

Color.

Reflections.

The horizon.

A plastic bottle on its way to a snag, or maybe the Gulf of Mexico.

And much more,

they answered.

None of them saw me,

or at least they didn’t say so,

but that wasn’t the answer I was looking for either.

Like the captain of the ship, I will not abandon my post.

If there are words for what I see, I will find them.

Look for me on the bridge, scanning the visions entering my soul

for Truth and Beauty and Meaning and Mystery

and the words that will enshrine the essence of what I see.

If you check and detect no pulse,

toss my body over the railing

and I will commune there at the bottom of the river

with the elements.

There will be others to carry on my search.

Sledding at 55

    It snowed last night so I carried my red racer - my chariot of death - the plastic sled I crashed into a tree few years earlier breaking my leg and I headed back to the hills of KU. 

    The air was right at the freezing mark. The sky, gray. The world, hushed. 

    I walked to Campanile hill. It was completely deserted except for a small tractor plowing snow down at base near the stadium.

    I laid my torso down into my sled, lifting my legs at the knees, and then I pushed off with my mittened hands, holding my arms to my side. It was a long, easy run, the snow rushing past my face. When you sled head first down a hill, the part of you that is aware of where you are is barely inches above the snow-covered ground. 

    When I reached the bottom, I looked across the way to the steep hills on the other side. KU has since put in a parking lot across the path I took that fateful day, but there were plenty of good, steep slopes remaining.

    I headed on over. When I got to the top of the steepest hill, there were two KU students with snowboards trying out the slopes. One of them expressed some appreciation that I was the first sledder they had seen today. They made no mention of my age although I suspect it was implied.

    I thought for a while about not hitting the smaller trees and a light pole near where my downward path would take me. And then I looked over at the larger trees well off to the side, trees not unlike the one I ran my right leg into not so very many years ago.

    And then I dismissed the risks. I put my body onto my sled - my face, forward into the unknowable - and I flew down the hill.

    The sensations are much the same as they were a few years ago - or forty odd years ago. You feel the speed - it feels fast - the rush of adrenaline, an explosion of neurons firing, snow flying into your face, the guttural, involuntary grunt as your chest bounces over a bump and you then feel as if you are about to lift off even though it is only fractions of an inch that you are actually airborne. Mostly you feel the speed.

    And then, as you near the bottom of the hill, you dig your toes down into the snow, extending your arms to gradually catch the snow to help bring your body to a stop before you grate into the parking lot.

    And that's the moment when you pause as you wait for your spirit to catch up to your body. 

    Then you trudge back up the hill, look out across the snow, the bare trees, the gray horizon. You catch your breath. And then you fly down the hill again.

    I think the sensations are much the same. It is the context that is different. All the peripheral excitement I felt when I was a kid with my friends, the chatter about who went farther or faster, or which run we should try next, and just the giddiness of being out in the snow instead of in school - all that is not part of my experience now.

    And then there’s this: when I was young I had no inkling that those sensations I was experiencing and the various accompanying pleasures of life would one day come to an end.

    The context is different.

    I flew several times today. I will accept a little risk to feel that feeling of flying over the snow again. To fly just one more time before the earth finally spins into the sun and there are no hills for me to sled ever again.

Global Drowning Dream

I heard three raps on the back door window.

I did not get up from my warm bed.

As I sat on the giant red and yellow plastic dumbbells in Burroughs Park Playground,

the water in the drainage channel  beside me began rising higher

from a early, warm spring behind a late, heavy snowfall.

Clambering to the top of the KU boathouse,

with its tan, textured, concrete walls,

well-designed to withstand flood,

the Kaw washed over the racing shells below.

I cheered as one slipped its moorings and skittered away.

Water still rising.

Quickly, now safely atop the grain elevators in North Lawrence,

having ingeniously borrowed the construction crane from the Bowersock hydro project

to hoist my bed high and dry,

the raging farm land and backstroking cows rushing below,

water rising only part way up the cement cylinders.

Noah’s rainbow promises

that the world will never again flood,

entirely,

climate change notwithstanding.

I hear three clacks on the cat knocker at my front door.

I yawn and turn over.

Row, row, row your boat rules.

Merrily, merrily …

Closets of words yet to be worn

A younger woman walked in front of me.

For a moment, I thought she was wearing nothing so much more than the long johns I wear under my nondescript baggy pants on her own legs descending from beneath her dark brown, thigh-length, down-filled nylon coat.

The term of art, I’m told by those who know, is leggings.

Sensible word.

But even to me, it was clear she knew what she was doing -

the tops of her silvery boots coming just up to a cushion of gray wool socks rolled at the base of her calves,

turquoise and teal knitted into the scarf wrapped around the base of her flax-at-dusk-streaked hair like the skirt under a decorated Christmas tree.

The impression she painted was perfect to my eye, though perhaps my earlier simile doesn’t quite fit.

I never caught more than a glimpse of one cheek as her head turned at the light, and her figure was well-muffled,

but the clack, clack, clack of her heels on the concrete sidewalk crossed over the threshold into my consciousness.

In the steps of a half-block, before she turned into a shop, perhaps in pursuit of the elements of her artistic expression, I tucked colored threads and the feel of soft leather on the eye into an envelope in my brain.

Surely there are more important things in the world than caring how you appear in the world - or crafting poetic tributes to style.

Still, it is my vain hope that the unknown subject of my study will read my words, and smile knowingly at the thought that the color woven into the yarn fashioned to keep her neck warm accomplished something more.

And as it was the horizontal folds at the backs of her knees that first drew my attention to her work, and if I have succeeded in my attempt to capture something of her style in my carefully chosen words, perhaps she will go out and buy another pair of leggings in tribute to my style.