Whither

I walk in circles at midnight in my bare feet on fresh laid asphalt.

The katydids are calling from black trees all around me.

The moon is a quarter million miles away, hidden behind drifting clouds.

I know that the moon is an airless sphere of dust and rock.

I know this fact as much as I know anything.

But, there, just over the sharp edge of black leaves in stillness up against a dull gray sky,

I see a fuzzy pale edge of moonlight against ice crystals.

After several paced circles more, an opening of deep space appears in the drifting clouds.

How can this be?

The moon is alive.

And I can feel the sun itself still lingering through the soles of my bare feet on material first laid down millions of years ago.

I walk on.

But now I must ask you to trust me on this next part:

If you come upon a bunny sitting in wet grass and weeds,

you can look deeply into it eye reflecting streetlight

and you will blink first.

But if you approach the same rabbit, however slowly,

you will eventually see the bright cottontail hopping off into the shadows.

Whither the moon?

Whither the eye of the rabbit?

Whither the eyes of my two bare feet after midnight?

And then pages turn.

And then after steps that no one will count,

the ice in my glass on the counter still clinks in the dark

after I step back through my own back door.

And then – one last scene – and you don’t have to believe me if you don’t want to –

a cricket crawls on cracked concrete when I flick on the light down in my basement.

The clock hanging crooked on the wall ticks the seconds away.

My arthritic big toe still throbs a little.

But yet you should have seen that cricket jump when I stuck out my own big toe.

Whither the cricket?

Whither the clock?

Whither the darkness and the light?

I’m still thirsty for ice water.

What do you know about that?

 

There is a bend in the river. On the far side, a trail runs through the trees alongside the river – it winds from Burcham Park to the bridge. On the near side, I have clambered down the limestone boulders of the levee several times now and I have built cairns at this bend in the river. That the rocks will come tumbling down – sooner or later - is no matter.

Now I particularly know this particular place along the bend because there is one large limestone boulder that looks las of it has a human-made scar on its face. It’s as if a giant drill bit pierced the limestone layer of rock so that it could be blown up into boulders with dynamite for the levee.   It could all have happened that way. I don’t know.

Nevertheless, this place is unmistakable to me when I stand there near the bend in the river. It’s like this: that one particular stone rests where it rests along that bend in the river, one stone among the many in the levee, waiting or not waiting across the water from where a footbridge along the trail crosses a small creek that empties into the far side of the Kaw River.

I could take you to that bend in the river if you wanted to see it. Or for now, I could show you some pictures instead.

These few photos are from the time that I built a particular cairn at that particular bend in the Kaw River.

Now I feel as if I must remind you that a cairn is just a small tower of rock - balancing. This one cairn had no great significance for me – except that I chose and I balanced the stones. The stones wouldn’t have done that all by themselves. Not just that particular way that I did it. And so I simply enjoy building small cairns along the river now and then. Not for forever. I just build a cairn now and then. Signifying a place. Signifying myself, perhaps. 

For now. Not for forever.

But a limestone boulder is a real thing. Like a cairn. Like a river. Like me.

Some scattering is to be expected over time.

And then that morning a heron happened along. That particular heron was as real as it could get on that particular morning several weeks ago. You can hardly see it in the photos I took – I had just turned back to look one more  time and I saw a great blue heron flying near the bend in the river, flying out over the water where the river bends, flying just past where I had built my cairn. I clicked my camera, hoping to capture something.

And what do you know about that?

I was there. I saw what I saw. I even have the photographs. And I still find it hard to believe that the sky could be so blue, that the water could have been so still, that the reflections of the trees on the far bank could appear so clearly on the surface of the river, that a heron could fly by just as I was looking back at the cairn I had built.

So I build cairns because I can.

What do you know about that?