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.
You can listen to a reading of 'The clarity of night,'
or read the text.
'All of the above' is an option.
Text:
For a moment everything came clear. I was full and emptied
all at once. It might have been love. It might have been joy. It might have
been a pang like a blade of star light. But there isn’t one word. There is this
instead.
I step down wooden steps in the night time. The wood has been
worn up through the gray paint from frequent passing. My feet soon feel the
gaps between the bricks on the patio. Weeds grow up green through red
rectangles.
But the bricks are not the color of the red tulips, fading,
unseen in the dark next to the garage that I scraped and painted white last
summer. It was nearly fall then. And green is not simply the color of one leaf.
More of all of this is in my recollection than what I can
feel in my mind through the soles of my feet. My eyes have turned upwards to
the stars.
The air is heavy with moisture, droplets too minute for my
eyes to measure. The Dipper has tumbled over so far overhead that only my skin
can feel what has been poured out. The air is clear and moist. Most stars are over
water and under foot.
And with only a few more steps, I will be knee deep in
peonies. The ground was frozen earth only last week, but the time only makes
sense if you could hold it like a tulip.
Now in the night, the blossoms, remembered white, petals
thin and fleshy, not like tissue or silk, but tonight they are more like fat,
leaf-wrapped blueberries. I can only feel in my memory last year’s uncrushed blooms
against my knees.
And then in my mind, walking across the intersection on the
other side of Mass street, it might have been at Eighth, a young woman steps
lively. We had never met. We never will.
She might have been with someone. She might have just
stepped off of the curb onto the pavement. She was hardly even then more than a
girl in bright sunlight.
And all that I can recall is that her dark socks - they
might have been navy - came up and over her knees. And then that her thin legs
were pale bare.
In the morning everything will be different.
A brown bunny will nibble at the green clover. A fuzzy
yellow bumble bee will alight on a damp peony bud. The bricks would be cool to
the touch – if I touched them. And the sky might be blue with some white.
And I will wonder where everything went and I will long for
just one more moment like the moment I remembered so long ago - only last night
in the dark when everything came clear - for just a moment.
