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.

Mindfulness

It’s all glass half full

or glass half empty

with me.

For some it’s the chicken

or the egg.

Or flip the other

side of the coin

if you can’t always get what you want.

If you can’t boil it down

to twenty-five words or less

maybe I could paint you a picture

worth a thousand words.

Jesus wept.

You have to drag the mountain to Mohammed.

You can lead a horse to water,

but you can’t beat it with a stick.

The pen is mightier,

but it’s not your father’s AK-47.

You could have had a V8.

Beauty is in the eye of the beholder

but it’s darkest before the dawn.

It may all have been said before,

but you haven’t walked to the river in my shoes.

As the Buddha said,

close your mouth and empty your mind

of all that nonsense,

and breathe.