A Long View…

Photo courtesy of: ‘Sprinkling’ by oliver – Pixabay
https://tinyurl.com/y92ar3n9

Once you reach a certain point in life, with a drifting mind’s eye, there’s an easy, sweet anamneses flashing to earlier times… to a pool of impressions that flicker through our lives, seeds that swelled over time. In that long view, we fathom what shaped us… a kind of poem of ourselves…

WAKING
By Ken McKeon

The hour wants to scoot away,
Just like a minute, a second,
Our lives too,

No matter how much of a drag they are,
How weighed down by
Failed lottery tickets,
Bad sleep, regret,
The creaking sounds
Of tumbrels in the streets,
Or music we’d rather not hear,

That’s why I wake,
Why I hear
Nothing but my mind,
Why I listen carefully enough
Until my mind hears me,
And then everything shows up,
The shifting whole starts happening again,

For all I know, it starts up everywhere,
In the nearly gluey flesh slides
Of the wriggling worms,
Of the living upright snails,
Their shells uncracked,
Their stemming horns alive with nuance.
The moist air lives in them,
They are the slowest of gains,
They have no fingers to click,
They are packed up and safe,
But they touch fully all that is,
As they trail on away in glisten feels,
Sliming silvery the dry sidewalks,
Then tumbling off the low ledges
Into the moist dark lawn,

I follow them,
I fall into the roping blades,
The wet green realm,
My heart beats there,
In the rich smells,

And the dull rubbery pale hose
Comes alive at dawn,
There’s this timer,
It really works,
It clicks away almost silently,
Beads running through our moving fingers,

And with the last snap
The sprinkler starts spinning
Right after the whoosh,

And it’s a go, it’s real, it’s the first light,
And rising swarming beading sprays
Lift and fall, then they swing across the world,
They return only to leave again, such endless joy,

And my neighbors are clumsy waking saints,
And they greet each other with chimes,
And I laugh like crystal,
And I wave and reach out
With my hands, my tongue, my words,

And the paper slaps down on the front steps,
And my grumpy sullen sister snores away,

As the Catholics ease out of their varied cars
And into the small church across the way.
I would follow them, but I am Protestant,
Though I have no idea just what that means,

I have no ideas at all,
But I do worship,
And the silence thunders,
And life again pours in,
And our breaths become the miracles of love.