Pause

 

Two women

delicate statues

Standing on the corner

the world goes by

Dressed in black and white

a gauzy skirt catches a light breeze

Lips bright red

Expressions frozen on their faces

Dollar in the bowler hat

they change

Delighted

Pensive

No inkling that they saw me

transfixed

but somehow I felt that they cared

A dollar for each doll

comes alive for only moments

I walk reluctantly away

longing to stare into their expectant eyes

for a long, long time.

Flight of the heron

Poetry wanders in the spaces in between the stars

and in the interstitial spaces deep in the folds of your brain.

Or I might simply say that Poetry is in the air.

And, of course, there is so much nonsense

and so little truth in this definition

that I have really only spoken of my ignorance.

It’s not that I have not wracked and pondered

and watched and waited for understanding.

And then I was walking across the bridge

and a heron took off from the shallows

and instead of a lazy, low, flap and glide

to the other side, he dug in his wings,

pulling hard against the air.

Building speed, he flew,

and hard he turned,

still grasping every molecule of air

and pushing them straight behind him.

The lowering sun shown off every gray feather

and his hard pointed bill thrust forward as he passed.

The strong winds buffeted his body

and he corrected his course,

until finally gaining the levee

the heron turned again, not resting,

wings moving with purposeful grace,

back toward the center of the river,

and then yet one more turn he took.

And that heron beat on and on,

finally headed straight down the river,

not having taken what would have seemed to me

to be a more straightforward path.

The heron spoke no words.

And it was not, after all, for my benefit that he flew.

Yet I paused in my thoughts

to watch that heron fly.

Water miracle

  

I walk to the river nearly every day and I have noticed that where I cross over the Kaw River Bridge, the water always flows from west to east. I am coming to the conclusion that gravity is inexorable. If you’ll pardon the obvious, the river Kaw flows from upstream, down. And the rain drops drop down. And then they mingle and the waters flow inexorably down.

But we interrupt the flow. Maybe I am not the only one to think that this, too, is something of a miracle. The city sticks a long straw out into the middle of the river and with pumps and pipes and tanks on towers, they take out and discard from the water what isn’t water from this very stream, mostly, as it flows along the interrupted way. And when I turn the tap at my kitchen sink, the river water splashes down into my glass. And if you haven’t noticed, this happens all over town.

This is perhaps no great drama. But there would be some little commotion if a pipe should break. And if the rain should cease to fall, we would soon dance on the dry streambed and cry out, our arms raised to the sky, until we finally fell down onto the burning sand and the vultures would come and clean our flesh from our bones. And then they, too, would fly away and down.

So I walk to the river to check. Gravity seems to be inexorable. The water a miracle. Our lives dangling down along a thread of water.