|
|
||
|
A Note of Observance |
||
|
What did you do today? A walk, a nap, and now I'd ask the ways I love is urged. Six mockingbirds, two larks, a hawk that struck a tanager. Plus (more bothersome stat) a scene undreamt since childhood. I stare at a rope that disappears, |
||
|
lost in the top of a tent. The big top, actually, it's as huge as night. Alone, high up, the trapeze artist, I must be viewer and act, cheer myself confident and trust the rope. The line goes taut as a beam-- |
||
|
I'm launched. I told you how, the winter past, I broke my foot cascading from a ski jump? I followed the white chute, and following woke in the hospital, the gap marked by a limp. So in the earlier transit, a summit, a blur-- |
||
|
thoughtless as a flushed quail, I drop the rope and swoop into the flank of night. Now, a scarlet wing, that color, the part that shouldn't fit: hair, face, myself sweep into flame as the earth looms up. For years I lived with that dream, |
||
| always the same--it wouldn't quit. Nor would it resolve in any waking act: an episode from reading, life, what I ate, bright lamp, the time of day. At first, only in naps; later, at night: though once I did read something |
||
|
indicative, that Persians, at the winder solstice, bound twigs to birds. Its kindling lit, each wren from a noble's fist provoked an antic fireworks. Peasantry had a humbler bonfire. None of this helped what age fixed: I was eleven when it quit. |
||
|
Until today. I thought of you, the birds I counted, of lonely walks, and how we often surprise the thing we've missed. I wanted to ask what you were doing while I slept off my hike, and not just then, but always: |
||
|
I had much to tell, all deep. But, nagged, I thought how color, both display and camouflage, is like the formulas for what we share and keep. Don't we step forth and declare, exposers and exposed? And dry as tinder in our ignorance. |
||
|
|
||